A hardware compilation flow for instance-specific VLIW cores

Hardware compilers for high-level programming languages are important tools to reduce the design productivity gap in hardware development. In this paper a hardware compilation approach is described, which is able to generate a hardware description based on a specification in a high-level programming language such as ANSI C. No modification of the program specification is required, allowing it to be suitable for a hardware and a software implementation at the same time. The parallelism is extracted by using VLIW optimization techniques. The generated hardware implementation is an instance-specific VLIW core, which is defined by its high-level program specification. To demonstrate the principle of the design flow, a prototype is presented which uses the VEX compiler as the front-end and the Handel-C tool chain as the back-end. The resulting instance-specific VLIW cores of several test functions are compared to equivalent software implementations.