Implicitly heterogeneous multi-stage programming for FPGAs

Previous work on semantics-based multi-state programming language design focused on homogeneous and heterogeneous software designs. In homogenous software design, the source and the target software programming languages are the same. In heterogeneous software design, they are different software languages. This paper proposes a practical means to circuit design by providing specialized offshoring translations from subsets of the source software programming language to subsets of the target hardware description language (HDL). This approach avoids manually writing codes for specifying the circuit of the given algorithm. To illustrate the proposed approach, we design and implement a translation to a subset of Verilog suitable numerical and logical computation. Through the translator, programmers can specify abstract algorithms in high level languages and automatically convert them into circuit descriptions in low level languages. © 2010 Binary Information Press.