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[Impulse Support]

Xilinx has published an application note (XAPP901) describing the use of Impulse C to create an PowerPC APU accelerator. The example demonstrated is a Mandelbrot fractal image generator. You can download this application note by clicking on the following link:

Accelerating Software Applications Using the APU Controller and C-to-HDL Tools

The complete project, ready for building and downloading to the Xilinx ML403 board, is available here:

www.ImpulseC.com/ReleaseFiles/Mandelbrot_ML403.zip

Please note that you will need the most current Xilinx EDK 7.1 distribution and service packs to build this sample project.

[David Pellerin]

There is a minor problem with the Mandelbrot sample project as provided on our web site (and in the Xilinx version on their website).

The DCM running the PPC should be put in high frequency mode for the frequency synthesizer. This is done by adding the following parameter to the UCF file:

PARAMETER C_DFS_FREQUENCY_MODE = HIGH

See also: Xilinx Answers Database #21936

By making this change, it will be possible to clock the PowerPC version of the algorithm at 300MHz, rather than 200MHz as supplied in the example. Without the above change, operating at 300MHz may or may not work.