When hardware acceleration is off, video games, high-definition videos and other programs will slow down your PC as the CPU tries to process everything. Turning it on offloads some of the processing power to specialized hardware like audio and graphics cards, freeing up your processor to handle more tasks.

This is because these devices are designed for a specific purpose and are more adept in this area than your computer’s general-purpose processor. Hardware accelerators are utilized for many tasks, including 3D rendering, decoding video and even regular expression hardware acceleration that can stop spam attacks using patterns such as ‘ R n’.

Hardware acceleration can be used as an engineering tool to boost the performance of algorithms that are computationally intensive and home would require a general-purpose CPU to take too long to run. They can be integrated into a chip or components that connect directly to processors, converting processor instructions to hardware accelerated functions. They can range in granularity, ranging from a single functional unit, such as memory blocks to handle bit blits to a complete hardware accelerator that runs fixed algorithms, for example motion estimation.

Cadence provides a complete set of tools that can be used to support each step of the hardware acceleration design process from Stratus high-level synthesizing and Genus logic to Innovus implementation system, conformal low-power analysis and Joules RTL power analysis. These tools let designers design cost-effective and efficient hardware accelerations that are optimized for the intended applications and markets.