Evaluation of the streams-C C-to-FPGA compiler

Abstract

The Streams-C compiler ([5]) synthesizes hardware circuits for reconfigurable FPGA-based computers from parallel C programs. The Streams-C language consists of a small number of libraries and intrinsic functions added to a synthesizable subset of C, and supports a communicating process programming model. The processes may be either software or hardware processes, and the compiler manages communication among the processes transparently to the programmer. For the hardware processes, the compiler generates Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) VHDL, targeting multiple FPGAs with dedicated memories. For the software processes, a multi-threaded software program is generated.