An Approach to Hardware Synthesis from a System Java Specification*

In this paper we present a new approach to HW/SW co-design starting from a system specification using the Java programming language. A novel compiler front-end is described that extracts all the needed information of the given specification and represents it in an Object-Oriented (OO) intermediate representation graph. It exploits diffe rent levels of parallelism to permit efficient binding onto an architecture of HW resources. A number of compiler transformations are then performed in order to generate the appropriate VHDL behavioural specification of the OO model. Finally High-Level Synthesis (HLS) techniques are used to generate the most adequate HW architecture.