Technical reports
Hardware synthesis from a stream-processing functional language
November 2012, 202 pages
This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted July 2004 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, St. John’s College.
DOI: 10.48456/tr-824
Abstract
As hardware designs grow exponentially larger, there is an increasing challenge to use transistor budgets effectively. Without higher-level synthesis tools, so much effort may be spent on low-level details that it becomes impractical to effectively design circuits of the size that can be fabricated. This possibility of a design gap has been documented for some time now.
One solution is the use of domain-specific languages. This thesis covers the use of software-like languages to describe algorithms that are to be implemented in hardware. Hardware engineers can use the tools to improve their productivity and effectiveness in this particular domain. Software engineers can also use this approach to benefit from the parallelism available in modern hardware (such as reconfigurable systems and FPGAs), while retaining the convenience of a software description.
In this thesis a statically-allocated pure functional language, SASL, is introduced. Static allocation makes the language suited to implementation in fixed hardware resources. The I/O model is based on streams (linear lazy lists), and implicit parallelism is used in order to maintain a software-like approach. The thesis contributes constraints which allow the language to be statically-allocated, and synthesis techniques for SASL targeting both basic CSP and a graph-based target that may be compiled to a register-transfer level (RTL) description.
Further chapters examine the optimisation of the language, including the use of lenient evaluation to increase parallelism, the introduction of closures and general lazy evaluation, and the use of non-determinism in the language. The extensions are examined in terms of the restrictions required to ensure static allocation, and the techniques required to synthesise them.
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BibTeX record
@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-824,
author = {Frankau, Simon},
title = {{Hardware synthesis from a stream-processing functional
language}},
year = 2012,
month = nov,
url = {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-824.pdf},
institution = {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
doi = {10.48456/tr-824},
number = {UCAM-CL-TR-824}
}