Hardware Join Java: a high level language for reconfigurable hardware development

Abstract

Development of high level Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) is an integral area of research in Reconfigurable Computing (RC). There is an apparent need to enhance the development tools available and achieve more abstraction in languages to make hardware development easier for software programmers. The lack of a unified hardware/software language and difficulties in system verification are also other issues currently being faced. To overcome these issues, we propose a Hardware Join Java language that uses the high level syntax and semantics of Java with additions to support reconfigurable hardware description. The language adopts Join Java semantics to allow specification of concurrency without the inherent complexity of Java's standard thread and monitor mechanisms. From a specification, hardware classes will be compiled and linked with VHDL source code. Standard Java classes can be used for the software part of an application and will serve as an interface.