Hardware design in education using CλaSH

Visually Representing and Manipulating Hardware Descriptions in Viskell

This paper investigates how the Viskell visual Haskell programming environment can be used for describing complex hardware in CλaSH. In particular, two concepts are discussed that are important in hardware design and CλaSH programming specifically, but do not normally arise when writing a functional program. Fist of all, in CλaSH, functions can contain memory and therefore have state. Secondly,...

Comparing CλaSH and VHDL by implementing a dataflow processor

As embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex, the design process and verification have become very time-consuming. Additionally, specifying hardware manually in a low-level hardware description language like VHDL is usually an error-prone task. In our group, a tool (the CλaSH compiler) was developed to generate fully synthesisable VHDL code from a specification given in the functional ...

Designing a dataflow processor using CλaSH

In this paper we show how a simple dataflow processor can be fully implemented using CλaSH, a high level HDL based on the functional programming language Haskell. The processor was described using Haskell, the CλaSH compiler was then used to translate the design into a fully synthesisable VHDL code. The VHDL code was synthesised with 90 nm TSMC libraries and placed and routed. Simulation of the...

A two step hardware design method using CλaSH

Hiding State in CλaSH Hardware Descriptions

Synchronous hardware can be modelled as a mapping from input and state to output and a new state. Functions in this form are referred to as transition functions. It is natural to use a functional language to implement transition functions. The CλaSH compiler is capable of translating Haskell code written in this form to VHDL. Modelling hardware using multiple components is convenient. Component...