Java to hardware compilation for non data flow applications

Abstract

Java has proven to be a powerful language for software development. In this paper we show that it is also suitable for hardware compilation, making it an attractive language for embedded system development. Our compilation technique, which is presented here, is based on separating different aspects of the program and use dedicated and specialised optimisations and code generators for each aspect. In this paper we focus on efficient implementation of random memory accesses, i.e. reference intensive tasks, such as graph traversal. We show that for these tasks the hardware generated by our compiler is up to 1.8 times faster than a software implementation. We also show how recursive algorithms can be mapped to hardware using our tool.