Handel-C
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Handel-C is a programming language and Hardware Description Language (HDL) for compiling programs into hardware images of FPGAs or ASICs. It is a rich subset of C, with non-standard extensions to control hardware instantiation and parallelism.
The subset of C includes all common C language features necessary to describe complex algorithms. Like many embedded C compilers, floating point data types were omitted. Floating point arithmetic is supported through external libraries that are very efficient.
In order to facilitate a way to describe parallel behaviour some of the CSP keywords are used, along with the general file structure of Occam.
[edit] History
The historical roots of Handel-C are in a series of Oxford University Computing Laboratory hardware description languages developed by the hardware compilation group. Handel HDL evolved into Handel-C around early 1996. The technology developed at Oxford was spun off to mature as a cornerstone product for Embedded Solutions Limited (ESL) in 1996. ESL was renamed Celoxica in September 2000.
Handel-C was adopted by many University Hardware Research groups after its release by ESL, as a result was able to established itself as a hardware design tool of choice within the academic community, especially in the United Kingdom.
Other subset C HDL's that developed around the same time are Transmogrifier C in 1994 at University of Toronto (now the FpgaC open source project) and Streams-C at Los Alamos National Laboratory (now licensed to Impulse Accelerated Technologies under the name Impulse C)
[edit] External links
- Oxford Handel-C
- Agility Design Solutions Company behind the DK Design Suite, a Handel-C IDE
- Handel-C Language Reference Manual From Agility Design Solutions
