| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/N64526/01 |
| Title: |
A RESOURCE-AWARE FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE FOR HARDWARE SYNTHESIS |
| Principal Investigator: |
Mycroft, Professor A |
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| Department: |
Computer Science and Technology |
| Organisation: |
University of Cambridge |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
01 October 2000 |
Ends: |
30 September 2003 |
Value (£): |
75,014
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| Communications |
Electronics |
| Information Technologies |
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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Current hardware synthesis languages (VHDL, Verilog) provide structural (assembly-like) and behavioural (higher-level) descriptions of hardware. They are difficult to reason about and to transform; optimisations tend to be proprietary and ad hoc.Our research is to consider functional languages as a framework for hardware specification and synthesis. Functional languages have simple transformation rules and ease the introduction of parallelism compared with non-declarative formulations.In contrast to previous work by Sheeran our use of functional languages is {resource aware}-i.e. function definitions represent functional units. Two calls to a function represent a shared functional unit (accessed by a bus or multiplexer and protected by some form of arbitration if necessary). Standard program transformations e.g. fold-unfold produce alternative mappings on the area-time spectrum. E.g. duplicating a function definition creates two similar functional units which may then be locally optimised if they are now not shared. Moreover, the functional high-level form can map into synchronous and asynchronous hardware (or even a mixture) with timing constraints being handled by automatically inserted (user-strategy not user-tactics) latches and arbiters.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.cam.ac.uk |