Syntax driven approach for RTL hardware synthesis of parallel programs

The Handel hardware compilation language, is designed and used for hardware specification and synthesis in the Computing Laboratory of Oxford University. It is very similar to a subset of occam and a meta-language environment is utilized to map abstract program syntax trees of Handel into functionally equivalent hardware netlists. The Handel compilation represents itself a syntax-directed strategy for mapping sequential and parallel operations into a maximally parallel hardware datapath, via robust transformations of programs into their equivalent normal form program. The sequential and parallel sets include RTL occam-like assignments. These features allow the circuit designers/programmers to exercise absolute control on the intended architectures, via rescheduling and/or modification of their Handel code so as to meet the various size/performance targets.