A C++ compiler for FPGA custom execution units synthesis

If reconfigurable processors are to become widely used, we will need tools to help conventional programmer use them. In particular, a single high-level language should be used to program the whole application; both the part which will become the hardware configuration and the part which remains software. Spyder is a reconfigurable processor with configurable execution units. The C++ language has been chosen as the source language to program this processor. In this paper we present a compiler capable of synthesizing the hardware configuration of FPGA execution units from C++ source code. The same source code can be compiled by a standard C++ compiler for simulation purposes. First estimates show that this approach leads to very short synthesize time as compared to VHDL synthesizer for a similar quality of the generated hardware.