Creating applications in RCADE

As FPGA density increases, so does the potential for reconfigurable computing machines. Unfortunately, applications which take advantage of the higher densities require significant effort and involve prohibitively long design cycles when conventional methods are used. To combat this problem, we propose a design environment to manage this additional complexity. Our environment gives the end-user a mechanism for describing and managing algorithms at a higher level of abstraction than other extant methods such as writing VHDL or using schematic capture. This paper describes an experimental version of the environment. The core of our design tool is a general Algorithm Description Format (ADF) which represents an algorithm as an attributed graph, and a library of components, which are tailored to a particular FPGA device. In this paper we present a set of tools which operate on the ADF representation to provide a number of functions to aid in the creation of applications for configurable computing platforms. These tools include front-end tools for specifying a design, a suite of analysis tools to aid the user in refining and constraining the design, and a set of back-end tools which select components from the library based on the design constraints and place and route these components on the configurable computing platform. In this paper, particular emphasis is placed on the component model and the analysis tools.