  As modern FPGAs evolve to include more het- erogeneous processing elements,
such as ARM cores, it makes sense to consider these devices as processors first
and FPGA accelerators second. As such, the conventional FPGA develop- ment
environment must also adapt to support more software- like programming
functionality. While high-level synthesis tools can help reduce FPGA
development time, there still remains a large expertise gap in order to realize
highly performing implementations. At a system-level the skill set necessary to
integrate multiple custom IP hardware cores, interconnects, memory interfaces,
and now heterogeneous processing elements is complex. Rather than drive FPGA
development from the hardware up, we consider the impact of leveraging Python
to ac- celerate application development. Python offers highly optimized
libraries from an incredibly large developer community, yet is limited to the
performance of the hardware system. In this work we evaluate the impact of
using PYNQ, a Python development environment for application development on the
Xilinx Zynq devices, the performance implications, and bottlenecks associated
with it. We compare our results against existing C-based and hand-coded
implementations to better understand if Python can be the glue that binds
together software and hardware developers.
