Abstract :
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
