Stream Programming for FPGAs

There is an increasing need for automated conversion of high-level design descriptions into hardware. We present a flow that converts a software application written in the Brook streaming language into a hardware description targeting FPGAs. We use a combination of our source-to-source compiler and a commercial C2H behavioral synthesis compiler to implement our flow. Our approach results in a significant throughput increase compared to software and ordinary C2H results (up to 8.9× and 4.3×, respectively). The throughput can be further increased by using more hardware resources to exploit data parallelism available in streaming applications.