Alterra Power (Canada)

Development work on the use of plasma torches in blast furnace ironmaking was completed in the 1980s. The technology developers planned to reduce blast furnace coke consumption using electrical energy and large scale coal injection through the tuyeres. Since this time, Westinghouse Plasma Corporation has improved torch reliability with industrial experience in solid-waste-to-energy facilities, as well as metallurgical applications. As coke makes up one-third of the hot metal cost, savings efforts frequently seek to lower coke consumption by increasing process efficiency or replacing coke with cheaper fuels. Alter NRG and Hatch assessed the merits of using plasma torch technology to superheat the hot blast. Coke rate savings, electrical purchase requirements, and a financial analysis to implement the torches are presented.

It is generally accepted that a custom hardware implementation of a set of computations will provide superior speed and energy efficiency relative to a software implementation. However, the cost and difficulty of hardware design is often prohibitive, and consequently, a software approach is used for most applications. In this article, we introduce a new high-level synthesis tool calledLegUpthat allows software techniques to be used for hardware design. LegUp accepts a standard C program as input and automatically compiles the program to a hybrid architecture containing an FPGA-based MIPS soft processor and custom hardware accelerators that communicate through a standard bus interface. In the hybrid processor/accelerator architecture, program segments that are unsuitable for hardware implementation can execute in software on the processor. LegUp can synthesize most of the C language to hardware, including fixed-sized multidimensional arrays, structs, global variables, and pointer arithmetic. Results show that the tool produces hardware solutions of comparable quality to a commercial high-level synthesis tool. We also give results demonstrating the ability of the tool to explore the hardware/software codesign space by varying the amount of a program that runs in software versus hardware. LegUp, along with a set of benchmark C programs, is open source and freely downloadable, providing a powerful platform that can be leveraged for new research on a wide range of high-level synthesis topics.

This paper discusses a methodology employed to create a tool that quantifies the effects of signal integrity limitations particularly for high-speed applications. The tool is based on a platform of routines which predict performance over high-speed links. It contains routines that optimize transmitter pre-emphasis and receiver equalization that lead to superior BER performance. The tool is qualified against Agilent's ADS simulator and correlated to measurements.