Chris and I went together with Takahiro Ohara – an engineer from Celoxica Japan – to see Dr Iwase, who is an instructor at Tokyo Denki University. Tokyo Denki University is a private university in Saitama Prefecture, to the north of Tokyo, which specializes in Electrical and Electronic Engineering; "denki" is actually the Japanese word for electricity. Dr Iwase told us that he had joined Tokyo Denki University in April, having obtained his PhD from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. We were joined by fourteen of Dr Iwase’s students, one of whom - Seiichi Kobayashi, a manager at NSK Ltd. [http://www.nsk.com/eng/company/network/japan.html] - was a mature part-time doctoral student.
Dr Iwase mentioned that he wants to utilise FPGAs to implement controllers for systems with actuators such as pulse-driven stepper motors. (Seiichi mentioned that his company has similar requirements, and that they are currently using gate arrays for this rather than FPGAs.) Dr Iwase said that he’d been looking for the easiest way to design an FPGA, and thought that Handel-C might be it. He said that parallelism is important not only for the implementation of a single control algorithm but also because in many applications there are multiple control algorithms operating simultaneously.
Dr Iwase was particularly concerned about the implications of using Handel-C to implement algorithms using floating point operations. Takahiro demonstrated that the DK-1 library does indeed support floating point operators, although he added that the resulting hardware is relatively expensive in terms of the number of gates used.
The meeting started at 5:00pm with an introductory presentation from Chris. Takahiro then gave some demonstrations and a quick tour of the DK-1 design suite, and answered numerous seemingly detailed questions (in Japanese). By the time the session finished it was nearly 7:00pm, which meant unfortunately that we didn’t have an opportunity to quiz Dr Iwase about the details of his research or teaching activities.