High Level Synthesis for Data-Driven Applications

John von Neumann proposed his famous architecture in a context where hardware was very expensive and bulky. His goal was to maximize functionality with minimal hardware. Presently, logical gates are nearly free and single chips will soon contain billions of gates. However, most current designs are still based on Von Neumannýs architecture because processors are built on this model. Nevertheless, the main current challenge is to be able to design, refine, synthesize and verify new architectures in a minimum time and with a maximum computational performance regardless of the gate count. Data driven architectures enable a high level of parallelism because instead of a single controller managing all the resources (and often a single ALU), tens or hundreds of small controllers can now operate in parallel on local processing units. This paper presents an environment for the high level description, refinement, synthesis and verification of such systems. Our own HDL is presented with its compiler and we show how it can be used as the intermediate language of a compiler for an even higher level functional programming language. Ongoing work will enable the interfacing with other languages (from both hardware and software communities). We also intend to target asynchronous designs.