Using Faust for Fpga Programming

In this paper we show the possibility of using FAUST (a programming language for function based block oriented programming) to create a fast audio processor in a single chip FPGA environment. The produced VHDL code is embedded in the on-chip processor system and utilizes the FPGA fabric for parallel processing. For the purpose of implementing and testing the code a complete System-On-Chip framework has been created. We use a Digilent board with a XILINX Virtex 2 Pro FPGA. The chip has a PowerPC 405 core and the framework uses the on chip peripheral bus to interface the core. The content of this paper presents a proof-of-concept implementation using a simple two pole IIR filter. The produced code is working, although more work has to be done for implementing complex arithmetic operations support.