Functioning Hardware from Functional Programs

To provide high performance at practical power levels, tomorrow’s chips will have to consist primarily of application-specic logic that is only powered on when needed. is paper discusses synthesizing such logic from the functional language Haskell. e proposed approach, which consists of rewriting steps that ultimately dismantle the source program into a simple dialect that enables a syntax-directed translation to hardware, enables aggressive parallelization and the synthesis of application-specic distributed memory systems. Transformations include scheduling arithmetic operations onto specic data paths, replacing recursionwith iteration, and improving data locality by inlining recursive types. A compiler based on these principles is under development. 1 Functional Programs to Hardware 3 2 Implementing Algebraic Datatypes in Hardware 5 3 Arithmetic and Hardware Datapaths 7 4 Recursion and Memory 11 5 Inlining Code and Recursive Types 15