FPGA architecture based on OpenCL for studying the acoustic backscattering by an immersed tube.

At a time when the semiconductor industry is facing major difficulties in maintaining sluggish growth, new high-level synthesis tools are repositioning FPGAs as a leading technology for hardware-based algorithm acceleration, in the face of CPUs based clusters. As they stand, however, these tools do not guarantee that a software engineer can use these technologies to their full potential without expertise in the underlying hardware. This particularity can be an obstacle to their democratization.