Compiling Image Processing Applications to Reconfigurable Hardware

This paper describes the compilation of high-level language programs written in a singleassignment language called SA-C into the binary codes used for programming recon gurable hardware. The primary application domain is image processing. The paper describes the SA-C language, the compiler and the optimizations it performs, the process of converting the intermediate form called data ow graphs into VHDL, and the generation of hardware con guration codes. Performance data on a typical image processing program, written in SA-C and executed on a recon gurable computing system, is presented and compared to a hand-written VHDL version and a C version running on conventional processors.