SILC: SPRITE Input Language with C(++)
Philip K. F. Hölzenspies · 2005
The SPRITE Input Language (SIL) was designed to enable transformational design in VHDL implementations of electronics. It gives a graphical view of the control- and data flow through the entire design, because it is itself a Control- and Data Flow Graph (CDFG), or actually a hypergraph. To allow a designer to get a clear overview, it allows for hierarchical abstractions that hide complexity, but still guarantee correctness. The assignment for this thesis was to extend SIL with types and operations that would allow the mapping of a greater subset of C(++) to it. This need arose from the observation that designs are often implemented first as a runnable specification. For this purpose C++ is used quite often. Moreover, applications in software sometimes need reimplementation in hardware, because they fail to meet (increased) performance criteria. Both of these cases call for an automated translation, because the manual methods often used are error prone and time consuming.