Closing the gap between hardware and software: hardware-software cosynthesis at Oxford

We present on overview of the work of the Hardware Compilation Research Group at Oxford on hardware-software cosynthesis. We refer to the ongoing work to develop a single framework for expressing programs which can be efficiently mapped into either hardware or software. Our supporting work on reconfigurable computing platforms is also briefly described. Our Handel-C language for hardware compilation is presented and we explain some of the major design decisions in its formation. We present an extended example of the development of a Handel-C program from an initial (sequential, simple, `obviously-correct´) implementation, to a refined (parallel, more complex, but still correct) implementation which makes better use of hardware and runs much faster