“Synthesizing Circuits: A Variety of Approaches ” side-

expressed in an HDL. This process essentially synthe-sizes a circuit from the HLL. Trident,5 the recipient of a 2006 R&D 100 award for innovative technology, synthesizes circuits from an HLL. It provides an open framework for exploring algorith-mic C computation on FPGAs by mapping the C pro-gram’s floating-point operations to hardware floating-point modules and automatically allocating floating-point arrays to off-chip memory banks using four schedulers and a loop pipelining scheme. Users are free to select floating-point operators from a variety of standard libraries, such as FPLibrary and Quixilica, or to import their own. Adding hardware platforms is a matter of defining new interface description files and producing the code to tie the design to the description interface. Trident’s open nature lets users rapidly pro-totype hardware from data analysis and simulation algo-rithms expressed in an HLL. The compiler’s open source code is available on SourceForg