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I don't know about plain old C, but there is a thing that's called "SystemC". You may want to run a Google on that ;-)
What you need to understand is the fundamental difference between C and VHD. C is a consecutive language (compare this, after that multiply, then add...à while VHDL is concurrent (sp?) in nature. That means that it 'evaluates' all statements at the same moment.
This is the proverbial PHILOSOPHICAL STONE .It would be great to do BOTH software and hardware in a comun language .Being C the most used generic programming language and the incredible base of programs written for it .It appears only natural to be the language of choice .
But THERE IS A BIG PROBLEM .. software and the C language is SEQUENTIAL .and hardware and VHDL is CONCURRENT ..
So somehow we have to map sequential code to parallel constructs ..
There is a lot going on .Several approaches like CELOXICA's HANDELC which is basically an augmented C language of parallel constructs . But your algorithm has to deal with parallel aspects from the very beggining .
There is another like Codeveloper from Inpulse kind a similar too
and there is spark which appears to be a real attack on the parallelization of code .
This i just download it to evaluate it ..
is still a very small program and in research stage .. so i think some day we will design in C code and we will decide what part will run in specialized and optimazed hardware .. IS A MATTER OF TIME it appears to be very much SOLVABLE
Even if there is a software that can do that, I don't think it's appropiate, cos these are totally different language, C is a programming language, VHDL is a hardware description language... when you write VHDL you're thinking on how a circuit should work, not how a program should run, it's different.
I talked to those guys ,they told me that spark doesn't work in XP or 2000
but only under CYGWIN (it crashes). They will be releasing a new version for windows !
of course SPARK is far from perfect yet. I have used myself for a while. But the impressive thing about it is:
1. basically one-mans-work (two other Phd's also helped S. Gupta a bit)
2. has the most-suited IR for high-level synthesis. The textbook HCDFG (hierarchical CDFG) as detailed in DeMicheli's book.
Hi V,
There are tools to convert C codes to VHDL.
Basically itz targetted towards system engineers, who r good at C and doesn't have an expertise on the VHDL.
Catapult C is C based logic Designer, where the design entry will be in C, and the ouput will be the HDL.
Combo and Seq design considertions r also taken care in this tool. it's from MentorGraphics.
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