The FPGA Development System CHDL

This paper presents the FPGA development system CHDL. The project was started to implement new methods of hardware software cosimulation and to integrate special FPGA features like the readback functionality for hardware debugging purposes. Many existing tools do not have such support or they put the main emphasis on either synthesis or simulation. In the CHDL system synthesis and simulation are both of same importance. CHDL supports the process of creating, simulating and debugging complex applications containing both reconfigurable and nonreconfigurable devices. Additionally CHDL can be used as a direct base for developing high level languages. By integrating the whole environment hardware of the FPGAs simulation can be performed very close to reality which reduces the need for hardware debugging to exceptional situations. CHDL is implemented as a C++ class library and supports the operating systems Windows 2000, NT 4.0, 98 and Linux. Supported hardware architectures are XILINX XC4000, Spartan, Spartan II, Virtex, Virtex E, Lucent ORCA3 and XILINX XC9500 PLDs.