# Becoming vendor agnostic with the help of model-based source code generation

- Institution: CERN
- Department: FPGA Developers' Forum (FDF)
- Speaker: Alexander Wirthmüller
- Year: 2024
- Language: English
- Source: [CERN](https://videos.cern.ch/record/3012077)
- Licence: [CERN](http://copyright.web.cern.ch)
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (sources give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the source's own words)

The mid-range FPGA market currently sees the introduction of new FPGA(-SoC) devices with attractive specs. This presentation highlights three key areas to avoid vendor lock-in by leveraging OSS model-based source code generation. The use case is a tabletop 3D laser scanner, implemented on FPGA(-SoC) devices of all major vendors. Firstly, in FPGA designs requiring (CPU) host-based control, design flexibility is increased by abstracting away the underlying UART/SPI/AXILite connection at the CPU-FPGA interface. This is achieved by co-generating C++ and VHDL source code for command and data passing. Secondly, IP blocks for SDRAM/MIPI/PCIe/HDMI are vendor specific. Simple parametrized wrappers help achieve vendor-independence for the most-employed interface features. Finally, live probing of FPGA designs via non-OSS protocols is tightly bound to vendor IDE's. Leveraging aforementioned CPU-FPGA interface, integrated RAM and case-specific RTL code generation helps bypass this dependency..

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## Lectures

1. [Becoming vendor agnostic with the help of model-based source code generation](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/learn/cern/3012077/a0aa441e7370), 29 min (CERN's player)