Macro-Based Hardware Compilation of Java Bytecodes into a Dynamic Reconfigurable Computing System

This paper presents a new approach to synthesize to reconfigurable hardware (HW) user-specified regions of a program, under the assumption of “virtual HW” support. The automation of this approach is supported by a compiler front-end and by an HW compiler under development. The front-end starts from the Java bytecodes and, therefore, supports any language that can be compiled to the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) model. It extracts from the bytecodes all the dependencies inside and between basic blocks. This information is stored in representation graphs more suitable to efficiently exploit the existent parallelism in the program than those typically used in high-level synthesis. From the intermediate representations the HW compiler exploits the temporal partitions at the behavior level, resolves memory access conflicts, and generates the VHDL descriptions at register-transfer level that will be mapped into the reconfigurable HW devices.