Published and produced by: Parallel and Distributed Systems Section

form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. Modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can implement digital circuits with millions of gates. This makes them very attractive for implementing Custom Computing Machines (CCMs): dedicated processors for specific computations. For some applications FPGA CCMs can provide a speedup of a factor 10 to 1000 or more relative to an implementation on a conventional processor. Particularly fruitful areas are signal processing, cryptography, and some classes of routing and planning problems. Unfortunately, implementing a CCM on an FPGA is currently an elaborate process requiring specialised knowledge. An important reason is the lack of a suitable programming language. Translation from programming languages such as C or Java is difficult and inefficient. Existing hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog are too low-level and too complicated for casual use, others use an unsuitable abstraction (SystemC, SpecC), or are too limited