Advanced accelerator control and instrumentation modules based on FPGA

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer a powerful alternative to application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) or general purpose processors in accelerator control applications. Software development for these devices can be awkward and time consuming, however, when using low level hardware design languages. To facilitate the use of FPGAs in control systems we are developing a library of software tools based on ImpulseC, a high level subset of the C language specifically designed for FPGA programming. Development and testing of the software will be performed on a Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA demo board. Here we present initial results of algorithms of relevance to controls applications implemented in Impulse C.