From C to Silicon

A major difficulty in the design of application-specific programmable signal processors is the program development for the processor [Pope84, Ruetz86]. Common software development tools are typically poorly suited for the task of generating code that must be targeted to varying architectures. This results in the program development being done directly in the machine language of the processor, discouraging architecture exploration because of the large time investment needed for machine code development. Determining whether a malfunction in the functional simulation of the processor is caused by an error in the code or by an error in the hardware design is very difficult. To ease the effort required in the software development and verification, a compiler for RL, a C-like language, has been developed.