JHDL - An HDL for Reconfigurable Systems

JHDL is a design tool for reconfigurable systems that allows designers to express circuit organizations that dynamically change over time in a natural way, using only standard programming abstractions found in objectoriented languages. JHDL manages FPGA resources in a manner that is similar to the way object-oriented languages manage memory: circuits are treated as distinct objects and a circuit is configured onto a configurablecomputing machine (CCM) by invoking its constructor, effectively "constructing" an instance of the circuit onto the reconfigurable platform just as object instances are allocated in memory with conventional object-oriented languages. This approach of using object constructors/destructors to control the circuit lifetime on a CCM is a powerful technique that naturally leads to a dual simulation/execution environment where a designer can easily switch between either software simulation or hardware execution on a CCM with a single application description....

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: FCCM
• Authors: Peter Bellows, Brad L. Hutchings
• Keywords: FCCM 1998, JHDL, JHDL Circuit Constructs, Object-oriented Languages, VLSI