• Small-HC : A Handel-C subset language

    will.stevens • 05/12/2019 at 08:20 • 0 comments

    Handel-C is a language related to C and Occam, designed for the purpose of translating programs directly into hardware. Handel-C was available and in use about 10-20 years ago, I'm not sure whether anybody still uses it now. Originially developed and sold by Celoxica, the DK Design Suite product which includes an implementation of Handel-C has since been aquired by Mentor Graphics.

    Although Handel-C allowed more-or-less direct compilation of ANSI-C programs to hardware circuits, the resulting circuits were seldom very good. More usually, Handel-C and the associated IDE served as a rapid development language and environment, in which a programmer could directly write parallelised, pipelined Handel-C programs which would result in a reasonably efficient circuit. It was also possible to use it to gradually refine an ANSI-C program into a form more suitable for hardware implemention. 


    The subset of Handel-C that I am working on is called 'Small-HC'. It supports some of the features of Handel-C, and more will be added over time. The following features are currently supported:

    • 'unsigned' variables with specified width - generally these correspond to registers in the resulting circuit
    • 'signal' qualifier to indicate that a variable represents a wire rather than a register.
    • Internal RAM (on-FPGA) and external RAM (connected via device pins)
    • 'par' and 'seq' constructs for parallel and sequential composition of statements
    • Input ports, through which specified FPGA pins can be connected to signals
    • Output ports, through which variables can be connected to FPGA pins
    • Currently no direct support for multiplication,division,modulus

    A short example program for flashing an LED (very quickly) is shown below:

    unsigned 1 testbit;
    port output(testbit) (163); // 163 is the output pin number on the FPGA


    void main(void)
    {
      while(1)
      {
        testbit = 0;
        testbit = 1;
      }
    }

  • Language and target architecture

    will.stevens • 04/13/2019 at 19:20 • 0 comments

    The starting point for this project will be a compiler for a subset of the Handel-C language. I want to target Lattice iCE40 FPGAs, because the bitstream for these devices has been reverse engineered, and open source place and route tools are available. (See project IceStorm).

    This compiler is based on the same research into hardware compilation that Handel-C was based on. One of the key papers can be found here: Compiling occam into FPGAs

    Initially my Handel-C subset compiler will be modified to produce verilog output (it was originally written to produce VHDL suitable for Atmel AT40K FPGAs), which can be fed into the IceStorm tools. Later, the compiler will produce a netlist, and I’ll write my own tools to map and place-and-route for the iCE40 architecture.