JHDL - An HDL for Reconfigurable Systems

JHDL is a design tool for reconfigurable systems that allows designers to express circuit organizations that dynamically change over time in a natural way, using only standard programming abstractions found in objectoriented languages. JHDL manages FPGA resources in a manner that is similar to the way object-oriented languages manage memory: circuits are treated as distinct objects and a circuit is configured onto a configurable computing machine (CCM) by invoking its constructor, effectively “constructing” an instance of the circuit onto the reconfigurable platform just as object instances are allocated in memory with conventional object-oriented languages. This approach of using object constructors/destructors to control the circuit lifetime on a CCM is a powerful technique that naturally leads to a dual simulation/execution environment where a designer can easily switch between either software simulation or hardware execution on a CCM with a single application description. Moreover, JHDL supports dual hardware/software execution; parts of the application described using JHDL circuit constructs can be executed on the CCM while the remainder of the application –the GUI for example– can run on the CCM host. Based on an existing programming language (Java), JHDL requires no language extensions and can be used with any standard Java 1.1 distribution.