Handel-C

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Handel-C is a programming language and Hardware Description Language (HDL) for compiling programs into hardware images of FPGAs 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.

[edit] 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.

Other subset C HDL's that developed around the same time are Transmogrifier C in 1994 at University of Toronto (now the FpgaC open source project) and Streams-C at Los Alamos National Laboratory (now licensed to Impulse Accelerated Technologies under the name Impulse C)