Using Functional Programming to Generate an LDPC Forward Error Corrector

FPGAs as commodities offer a resource for high-performance computation that is unmatched in flexibility and price/performance. As a lab, we are interested in high-level descriptions of computation and data, and how they may be customized to map effectively on FPGA fabrics. This paper describes our tool-chain, approach and methodology to FPGA utilization. We give a case study of the generation of a low density parity checking forward error correction algorithm, and discuss the specific challenges we faced with using FPGAs as our target.