Customer Specific Verilog Code
In last week’s post I showed the ANIC adapter pipeline and an astute observer may have noticed a block labeled “Customer Specific Verilog Code”. For those not familiar, Verilog is a language used to program FPGAs. It isn’t a high-level programming language like C or Java but rather a hardware description language (HDL) used to model electronic systems. Accolade has many engineers (or “designers” as they prefer to be called) that are very experienced with Verilog because our greatest value add is the ability to provide sophisticated CPU offload functionality with FPGAs.
Typically, our end-customers are not well versed in Verilog and the last thing they want to do is actually develop a Verilog-based design. However, on that rare occasion when a customer does have Verilog experience and actually wants or needs to do their own design, Accolade has put a process in place whereby customer specific Verilog code can be inserted directly into the adapter pipeline. One example, when this may be necessary is if the customer has a very secretive security algorithm or other proprietary techniques that they don’t want to expose to Accolade engineers.