Star Bridge FPGA "HAL" More Than Just Hype
Gregus writes "Though mentioned or discussed in previous /. articles, many folks (myself included) presumed that the promises of Star Bridge Systems were hype or a hoax. Well the good folks at NASA Langley Research Center have been making significant progress with this thing. They have more info and videos on their site, beyond the press release and pictures posted here last year. So it's certainly not just hype (though $26M for the latest model is a bit beyond the $1,000 PC target)."
We started using FPGA's in our HPC designs where I work several years ago - the designs are faster, more reliable, and quicker to design. StarBridges graphical development environment is a lot like another product sold by Anapolis Micro called Corefire.
Corefire is a java based graphical (iconic)development environment for Xilinx FPGA's. It is like anything else though sometimes programming in VHDL will be a better choice, it depends on the complexity of the design and the desired end result. But all in all we probably saved at least 6 man-months of design time using Corefire.