+Project Oscar aims to provide a hardware and software architecture to estimate
+and control the deflection of cantilevers. The hardware part consists in a
+high-speed camera, linked on an embedded board hosting FPGAs. By the way, the
+camera output stream can be pushed directly into the FPGA. The software part is
+mostly the VHDL code that deserializes the camera stream, extracts profile and
+computes the deflection. Before focusing on our work to implement the phase
+computation, we give some general information about FPGAs and the board we use.
+
+\subsection{FPGAs}
+
+A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit
+designed to be configured by the customer. FGPAs are composed of
+programmable logic components, called configurable logic blocks
+(CLB). These blocks mainly contains look-up tables (LUT), flip/flops
+(F/F) and latches, organized in one or more slices connected
+together. Each CLB can be configured to perform simple (AND, XOR, ...)
+or complex combinational functions. They are interconnected by
+reconfigurable links. Modern FPGAs contain memory elements and
+multipliers which enable to simplify the design and to increase the
+performance. Nevertheless, all other complex operations, like
+division, trigonometric functions, $\ldots$ are not available and must
+be done by configuring a set of CLBs.
+
+Since this configuration is not obvious at all, it can be done via a
+framework that synthetize a design written in an hardware description
+language (HDL), and after, that place and route
+
+ is used to configure a FPGA.
+FGPAs programming is very different from classic processors programming. When
+logic blocks are programmed and linked to perform an operation, they cannot be
+reused anymore. FPGAs are cadenced more slowly than classic processors but they
+can perform pipeline as well as parallel operations. A pipeline provides a way
+to manipulate data quickly since at each clock top it handles a new
+data. However, using a pipeline consumes more logics and components since they
+are not reusable. Nevertheless it is probably the most efficient technique on
+FPGA. Parallel operations can be used in order to manipulate several data
+simultaneously. When it is possible, using a pipeline is a good solution to
+manipulate new data at each clock top and using parallelism to handle
+simultaneously several pipelines in order to handle multiple data streams.
+
+%% parler du VHDL, synthèse et bitstream
+\subsection{The board}
+
+The board we use is designed by the Armadeus compagny, under the name
+SP Vision. It consists in a development board hosting a i.MX27 ARM
+processor (from Freescale). The board includes all classical
+connectors : USB, Ethernet, ... A Flash memory contains a Linux kernel
+that can be launched after booting the board via u-Boot.
+
+The processor is directly connected to a Spartan3A FPGA (from Xilinx)
+via its special interface called WEIM. The Spartan3A is itself
+connected to a Spartan6 FPGA. Thus, it is possible to develop programs
+that communicate between i.MX and Spartan6, using Spartan3 as a
+tunnel. By default, the WEIM interface provides a clock signal at
+100MHz that is connected to dedicated FPGA pins.
+
+The Spartan6 is an LX100 version. It has 15822 slices, equivalent to
+101261 logic cells. There are 268 internal block RAM of 18Kbits, and
+180 dedicated multiply-adders (named DSP48), which is largely enough
+for our project.
+
+Some I/O pins of Spartan6 are connected to two $2\times 17$ headers
+that can be used as user wants. For the project, they will be
+connected to the interface card of the camera.