+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, like ISE. Such a
+software can synthetize a design written in an hardware description
+language (HDL), map it onto CLBs, place/route them for a specific
+FPGA, and finally produce a bitstream that is used to configre the
+FPGA. Thus, from the developper point of view, the main difficulty is
+to translate an algorithm in HDL code, taking account FPGA resources
+and constraints like clock signals and I/O values that drive the FPGA.
+
+Indeed, HDL programming is very different from classic languages like
+C. A program can be seen as a state-machine, manipulating signals that
+evolve from state to state. By the way, HDL instructions can execute
+concurrently. Basic logic operations are used to agregate signals to
+produce new states and assign it to another signal. States are mainly
+expressed as arrays of bits. Fortunaltely, libraries propose some
+higher levels representations like signed integers, and arithmetic
+operations.
+
+Furthermore, even if FPGAs are cadenced more slowly than classic
+processors, they can perform pipeline as well as parallel
+operations. A pipeline consists in cutting a process in sequence of
+small tasks, taking the same execution time. It accepts a new data at
+each clock top, thus, after a known latency, it also provides a result
+at each clock top. However, using a pipeline consumes more logics
+since the components of a task are not reusable by another
+one. Nevertheless it is probably the most efficient technique on
+FPGA. Because of its architecture, it is also very easy to process
+several data concurrently. When it is possible, the best performance
+is reached using parallelism to handle simultaneously several
+pipelines in order to handle multiple data streams.
+
+\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.