Languages
Donald G. Bailey · 2011
Four quite different approaches to programming an Field programmable gate array (FPGA) have been presented in this chapter. Hardware description languages (very high speed integrated circuit HDL (VHDL) and Verilog) are good at describing hardware, and are inherently concurrent. Conventional software languages, such as C and MATLAB, are much better for representing algorithms, so if the translation step from software to HDL can be avoided, significant gains in productivity can be achieved. Two approaches are taken for using these languages to programme FPGAs. One is to extend the language to enable it to describe hardware, by adding concurrent constructs. The other approach is to leave the language unchanged, but to enhance the compiler to automatically identify and extract any parallelism from within the algorithm. The fourth approach is to use some form of visual language to represent the operation of the hardware. Controlled Vocabulary Terms hardware description languages; hardware-software codesign; logic programming languages