Hardware synthesis from a traditional programming language

Student: Dylan Radcliffe

Supervisor: Peter Sutton

Category: Engineering Thesis Project - Computer Systems

The development of complex modern digital technology has been made possible through the use of automated design tools. A significant area of research in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is in the development of tools that can synthesise hardware from a design written in the form of a high-level programming language such as C. It is believed that these Hardware Compilers will help to decrease development time thus shortening the crucial time-to-market for designs. This makes them particularly applicable to programmable hardware devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that are growing in popularity as fast, reconfigurable development platforms.

Commercial products that allow this approach to hardware design are starting to become available but are not yet fully mature or accepted by the design community. One problem with these products is that they are closed, proprietary systems making them less available and essentially unmodifiable. The aim of this thesis was to produce an open implementation of a Hardware Compiler that was flexible enough to be extended by future developers.

The outcome of this study was the development of a fundamental framework for an open Hardware Compiler, Circe, accepting input in a variant of C and producing a structural hardware description. The developed design flow produces target-independent output that can be simulated or mapped to specific technologies using a range of common design tools. Designs produced using Circe were successfully simulated and mapped to a Xilinx FPGA. They were shown to accurately reflect the original C behaviour and the efficiency of the produced hardware is comparable with a similar commercial tool. A number of future directions for Circe have been outlined to demonstrate the potential of this open system.

Thesis Document (PDF)

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