GOWIN Semiconductor Adds Ubuntu Support to their GOWIN EDA FPGA Software for Improved AI and IoT Development Toolchain Integration

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GOWIN Semiconductor Corp., the world’s fastest-growing programmable logic company, announces support for their GOWIN EDA FPGA development software in Ubuntu Operating System enabling developers with a single environment for Artificial Intelligence and IoT connectivity development.

Traditional FPGAs have had a long history of development tool support for Windows and Red Hat, but in many cases lacked universal Linux support for other distributions such as Ubuntu. This has caused development burdens as Ubuntu has matured and become the most commonly supported operating system for Artificial Intelligence solution development. Neural network model development software such as Caffe, Tensorflow and Keras have found Ubuntu as the preferred operating system due to its open source support and scripting capabilities. As a result, having GOWIN’s FPGA EDA in the same operating system allows developers to seamlessly integrate FPGA synthesis, place and route and bitstream generation into their AI design and script work flows.

“AI developers have had the burden of needing to use multiple operating systems when developing edge inference solutions on traditional FPGAs,” said Grant Jennings, Director of International Marketing at GOWIN Semiconductor. “With Ubuntu OS support, AI developers can now automate their FPGA design flow. Current modeling scripts can be updated to natively generate FPGA bitstreams of their trained network. They can also automatically load the FPGA bitstream and perform test runs on the hardware platform itself. GOWIN is very excited about Ubuntu support as it allows for much faster development cycles and more rigorous testing capabilities of edge deployed neural networks.”

The IoT and full-stack web development community has also embraced Ubuntu in recent years for supporting connected edge devices.  As a result, support for GOWIN EDA allows for FPGA development and deployment updates in parallel with the rest of the system.  This integration allows for better build management between connected FPGAs at the edge and the software running on the server or broker.

“While supporting traditional RTL compilation flow, GOWIN is evolving our toolchain to enable pioneer technologies. Providing a singular environment for multiple software tools that can be scripted both for automated development and testing has become critical in the IoT and server space,” said Dr. Jianhua Liu, Director of Software for GOWIN Semiconductor. “Now, developers can integrate FPGA synthesis, deployment and testing for edge IoT applications bridging the gap between the device in the field and the server controlling or monitoring it.”

GOWIN provides updated installation instructions for Ubuntu OS and will start to include scripts for Ubuntu in many future reference designs and development boards including the GOWIN GoAI artificial intelligence development flow.