Constraint-Based Hardware Synthesis

We propose a high-level hardware description environment which aims at reducing the gap between application design and the well-established hardware description frameworks. Our motivations rise from an explicit demand for design representation languages at a higher abstraction level with respect to the ones currently adopted by hardware system engineering. A candidate solution can be identified in the constraint programming paradigm. In particular our work investigates the possibility of synthesising special-purpose hardware devices starting from the Constraint Handling Rule formalism. Our method can be used to guide the development of a prototype source-to-source compiler capable of producing, from a constraint based expression, compliant Hardware Description Language code. This paper includes a prototype implementation that allows for efficient parallel execution of multi-set constraint rewrite rules.