On 2009-02-08, Viktor Pracht wrote:
> The reason I can't wait to get my hands on an OGD1 is to play with
> architectures with a functional (as opposed to imperative) machine
> language. Even though our FPGA is not partially reprogrammable, it's big
> enough to simulate a smaller FPGA with any custom architecture.
On a related but different topic, there was a paper posted to Lambda
the Ultimate half a year ago about using functional languages for
hardware design:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2880
Apparently the use of functional languages for hardware design was
explored in the early 1980s, before VHDL and Verilog. The reason it
didn't catch on probably has more to do with the success of the latter
languages than with the infeasibility of the functional approach. I
haven't read the paper carefully, but the author makes an interesting
case of how FP can express classes of circuits parametrically, and
select optimal circuits from a set based an some metric. The metric
can then depend on the context in which the element is placed, so that
the element is specialised for the context in which they are
instantiated.
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