Object-Oriented Domain Specific Compilers for Programming FPGAs
[IEEE Transactions on VLSI, special issue on Reconfigurable Computing]

Oskar Mencer, Marco Platzner, Martin Morf, Michael J. Flynn


abstract.

Simplifying the programming models is paramount to the success of 
reconfigurable computing with FPGAs. This paper presents a methodology 
to combine true object-oriented design of the compiler/CAD tool with an 
object-oriented hardware design methodology in C++. The resulting system 
provides all the benefits of object-oriented design to the compiler/CAD 
tool designer and to the hardware designer/programmer. The two examples 
for domain-specific compilers presented are BSAT and StReAm. Each 
domain-specific compiler is targeted at a very specific application domain,
such as applications that accelerate boolean satisfiability problems with
BSAT, and applications which lend themselves for implementation as a 
stream architecture with StReAm.

The key benefit of the presented domain specific compilers is a reduction 
of design time by orders of magnitude while keeping the optimal performance 
of hand-designed circuits.