CAPH

CAPH is a domain-specific language for describing and implementing stream-processing applications on reconfigurable hardware, such as FPGAs. CAPH generates VHDL code from high-level descriptions of signal or image processing applications. CAPH relies upon the actor/dataflow model of computation. Applications are described as networks of purely dataflow actors exchanging tokens through unidirectional channels and the behavior of each actor is defined as a set of transition rules using pattern matching.

CAPH comes with :

• a higher-order, purely functional language for description of complex dataflow networks
• a rich type system with sized-integers, booleans, floats, fully polymorphic algebraic data types and dependent types
• automatic type inference and type-checking
• higher-order actors (actors taking functions as parameters)
• pattern-matching based description of actor behavior
• graphical visualisation of dataflow networks
• code simulation with trace facilities
• SystemC back-end for simulation
• VHDL backend, generating target-independant, ready-to-synthetize, time and space-efficient VHDL code
• a foreign-function interface (FFI) to use existing SystemC or VHDL code

Project web page

Tutorial and Reference manual.

Pre-requisites :

• Ocaml version >= 4.06.0 with the following packages

  • ocamlbuild
  • ocamlfind
  • camlp4

• A running Latex installation, with the pdflatex command if you want to build the documentation from sources

• A Qt5 installation if you want to build the GUI

Clone the source tree from the github repo (git clone https://github.com/jserot/caph).

From the root of the source tree :

1. ./configure [options] (./configure --help for the list of options)
2. make
3. make install