Accelerator Functional Unit Developer’s Guide for Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card

ID 683129
Date 7/20/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.1. Overview of the OPAE SDK

The OPAE SDK is a development environment that supports synthesizing AFs targeted for a specific OPAE-compliant hardware platform from an OPAE-compliant AFU.
The OPAE SDK consists of two hardware development components:
  • The database, tools, scripts and ancillary files required to target AF generation for a specific hardware platform.
  • The OPAE version supported by the hardware platform used to configure a build environment for AFU simulation and compilation on the target hardware platform.
Figure 2. Overview of the OPAE SDK

OPAE's Platform Interface Manager (PIM) defines a non-hardware specific OPAE Platform that provides generic classes of device interfaces. The OPAE platform is an abstraction of a hardware platform for which AFUs are designed. This level of abstraction enables generating AFs from AFUs designed for the generic OPAE Platform for any OPAE-compliant hardware platform that offers the device interfaces required by the AFU. The PIM generates a platform shim based upon device interfaces and properties requested by the AFU. The platform shim is inserted between the hardware platform’s PR region boundary and the AFU and provides the top-level module interface for the AFU.

See the Overview of the OPAE Platform for AFUs for more details on the OPAE.

See the OPAE SDK Design Flow for AFU Development for the process used by AFUs to request top-level interfaces and configure simulation and synthesis build environments.