Automated synthesis of streaming C applications to process networks in hardware

The demand for embedded computing power is continuously increasing and FPGAs are becoming very interesting computing platforms, as they provide huge amounts of customizable parallelism. However, programming them is challenging, let alone from a high level language. In [1], the ESPAM methodology was already presented to quickly obtain realizations on FPGAs from sequential C code. The realization consists of a network of processors and IP cores. In this approach, a problem was that the IP cores had to be provided manually. In this paper, we present an extension on the ESPAM methodology by incorporating the industrial high level synthesis tool PICO from Synfora Inc. In this way, we realize the automated generation of efficient hardware implementations on FPGAs from a single sequential C input specification of a streaming application. We demonstrate our approach for the Sobel and QR applications.