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Seeking to eliminate the need for detailed hardware expertise for FPGA design, a research group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) here has developed an open-source C compiler for reconfigurable logic. Called Streams-C, the compiler doesn't generally yield the performance of RTL design but claims to boost productivity by 10 to 100 fold.
Streams-C accepts a subset of the C programming language, performs behavioral synthesis, and outputs synthesizable RTL VHDL code. It currently targets Xilinx Virtex-2000 devices on Annapolis Microsystems' Firebird board, but claims to be easily retargetable.
"After a few years of looking at the problem, I realized that most of the application space could be described well with a stream-oriented communicating sequential processes model," she said.
The result was Stream-C, which is freely available for research and government purposes, with a commercial licensing process underway. Gokhale said that in addition to LANL, several universities are using the compiler, and EDA companies have expressed interest in commercializing it.
Posted to general by Patrick Logan on 2/27/04; 12:16:57 PM
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Open-source C compiler targets FPGAs
