Automatic mapping of C to FPGAs with the DEFACTO compilation and synthesis system

The DEFACTO compilation and synthesis system is capable of automatically mapping computations expressed in high-level imperative programming languages as C to FPGA-based systems. DEFACTO combines parallelizing compiler technology with behavioral VHDI, synthesis tools to guide the application of high-level compiler transformations in the search of high-quality hardware designs. In this article we illustrate the effectiveness of this approach in automatically mapping several kernel codes to an FPGA quickly and correctly. We also present a detailed example of the comparison of the performance of an automatically generated design against a manually generated implementation of the same computation. The design-space-exploration component of DEFACTO is able to explore a large number of designs for a particular computation that would otherwise be impractical for any designers.