Olivier Bruendler
As a Staff Engineer at Enclustra and the creator of the Open Logic project, Oliver Bründler has spent over 15 years developing FPGA solutions for a wide range of applications, including high-speed signal processing, motor control, video processing, and particle accelerator electronics.
Oliver’s career began in Enclustra's design services, where he worked on numerous customer DSP projects. He then joined the Paul Scherrer Institute to develop digital RF electronics for particle accelerators before returning to Enclustra in a technical leadership role. This diverse experience exposed him to a recurring challenge that inspired Open Logic: the lack of robust, reusable FPGA components for fixed-point mathematics and other common circuitry.
The final catalyst came from his teaching experience. Since 2021, Oliver has taught graduate courses in digital microelectronics and found himself advising students against building their own basic components—like FIFOs and CDCs—without being able to provide a good alternative. This gap between best practices and available tools motivated him to create Open Logic, a project dedicated to providing the FPGA community with the reliable, vendor-independent components he found missing throughout his career.
Fixed Point Math in the Open Logic FPGA Standard Library
Status: Not yet available - Stay tuned!FPGAs excel at high-performance DSP applications due to their parallel processing capabilities, but fixed-point algorithm implementation often suffers from fragmented toolchains. DSP algorithms are typically developed in Python for rapid prototyping, but translating these models to HDL requires manual recoding with inconsistent fixed-point support across Python and VHDL/Verilog. This leads to lengthy verification cycles and potential bit-exactness errors. Additionally, the absence of standardized libraries forces developers to repeatedly implement basic elements like FIFOs, CDCs, and delay lines.
Open Logic, a vendor-independent standard library, addresses both of these challenges. Its fixed-point mathematics framework provides a unified notation that remains consistent across Python and HDL implementations in both VHDL and Verilog. This common syntax enables straightforward manual translation with minimal transcription errors, while automated verification tools confirm bit-exact equivalence between Python prototypes and HDL implementations. This approach also allows for parametrizable, reusable HDL code with automatic word-width scaling.
This talk will briefly cover Open Logic's core concepts, including its library of standard components (FIFOs, CDCs, and delay lines). We will then demonstrate a complete fixed-point development workflow using a practical example. Attendees will see the process from initial Python model definition through HDL implementation to bit-exact verification, highlighting the time savings and reduced error potential compared to traditional manual approaches.