- Handel-C
Handel-C is a programming language and
Hardware Description Language (HDL) for compiling programs into hardware images ofFPGA s or ASICs. It is a rich subset of C, with non-standard extensions to control hardware instantiation and parallelism.The subset of C includes all common C language features necessary to describe complex
algorithms . Like many embedded C compilers, floating point data types were omitted. Floating point arithmetic is supported through external libraries that are very efficient.In order to facilitate a way to describe parallel behaviour some of the CSP keywords are used, along with the general file structure of Occam.
History
The historical roots of Handel-C are in a series of
Oxford University Computing Laboratory hardware description languages developed by the hardware compilation group. Handel HDL evolved into Handel-C around early 1996. The technology developed at Oxford was spun off to mature as a cornerstone product for Embedded Solutions Limited (ESL) in 1996. ESL was renamed Celoxica in September 2000.Handel-C was adopted by many University Hardware Research groups after its release by ESL, as a result was able to established itself as a hardware design tool of choice within the academic community, especially in the United Kingdom.
In early 2006, Celoxica's ESL business was acquired by Catalytic, a startup selling a MATLAB to C tool. Soon thereafter, Celoxica and Catalytic merged to form Agility, which develops and sells, among other products, ESL tools supporting Handel-C.
Other subset C HDL's that developed around the same time are Transmogrifier C in 1994 at
University of Toronto (now theFpgaC open source project) and Streams-C atLos Alamos National Laboratory (now licensed toImpulse Accelerated Technologies under the nameImpulse C )External links
* [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/rd/49527001%2C78794%2C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs/3848/ftp:zSzzSzftp.comlab.ox.ac.ukzSzpubzSzDocumentszSztechpaperszSzIan.PagezSzumist.pdf/page96hardwaresoftware.pdf Oxford Handel-C]
* [http://www.agilityds.com Agility Design Solutions] Company behind the DK Design Suite, a Handel-C IDE
* [http://www.agilityds.com/literature/HandelC_Language_Reference_Manual.pdf Handel-C Language Reference Manual] From Agility Design Solutions
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