NAPA C: Compiling for a Hybrid RISC/FPGA Architecture

  • Authors:
  • Maya B. Gokhale;Janice M. Stone

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • FCCM '98 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on FPGAs for Custom Computing Machines
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Hybrid architectures combining conventional processors with configurable logic resources enable efficient coordination of control with datapath computation. With integration of the two components on a single device, loop control and data-dependent branching can be handled by the conventional processor, while regular datapath computation occurs on the configurable hardware. This paper describes a novel pragma-based approach to programming such hybrid devices. The NAPA C language provides pragma directives so that the programmer (or an automatic partitioner) can specify where data is to reside and where computation is to occur with statement-level granularity. The NAPA C compiler, targeting National Semiconductor's NAPA1000 chip, performs semantic analysis of the pragma-annotated program and co-synthesizes a conventional program executable combined with a configuration bit stream for the adaptive logic. Compiler optimizations include synthesis of hardware pipelines from pipelineable loops.