Towards compilation of an imperative language for FPGAs

Abstract

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA’s) have been around since the early 1980s and have now achieved relatively widespread use. For example, FPGAs are routinely used for high-performance computing, financial applications, seismic modelling, DNA sequence alignment, software defined networking and, occasionally, are even found in smartphones. And yet, despite their success, there still remains something of a gap between programming languages and circuit designs for an FPGA. We consider the compilation of an imperative programming language, Whiley, to VHDL for use on an FPGA. A key challenge lies in splitting an arbitrary function into a series of pipeline stages, as necessary to expose as much task parallelism as possible. To do this, we introduce a language construct which gives the programmer control over how the pipeline is constructed.