Meta-HDL: A Multi-Stage Programming Language for Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware

We present Meta-HDL, a two-stage functional language for writing software which dynamically synthesizes and communicates with structurally specialized circuits. The associated type system ensures that compiled programs cannot attempt to generate nonsynthesizable logic. We implement the system bymodifying the MetaOCaml bytecode compiler/interpreter to enforce our typing restrictions and emit synthesizable JHDL netlists at runtime. Finally, we examine two sample programs which demonstrate the wide degree to which the generated circuits can vary based on runtime inputs.