The best thing about field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), when you have a massively parallel application, is that everything runs in parallel. The worst thing about FPGAs, when you need a lot of stuff to happen in sequence, is that everything runs in parallel. If you have a multi-step computation, for example, you need to break it up into chunks, figure out the timing between them, and make sure that each chunk clears before it is fed new data. This is pipelining, and taking care of all the low-level details yourself is one of the things that can sometimes make FPGA a four-letter word beginning with “F”.
[Julian Kemmerer]’s PipelineC is a C-like language that compiles down into VHDL so that you can use it in an FPGA, and it does the pipelining for you. He has examples of how you’d use it to construct a simple state machine, and after you’ve written a few hundred state machines the long way, you’ll know why this is a good idea.
PipelineC isn’t the only high level synthesis language out there, but it sits in an interesting place. It doesn’t take care of memory or define interfaces. It just takes care of pipelining. We haven’t tried it out yet, but it looks like it would be interesting for moderately complex projects, where the mechanics of pipeline signalling is a hassle, but you don’t require the deluxe treatment. Check it out, and if you like it, let us (and [Julian], natch) know.
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