ALCHA

A New Programming Language for FPGA Projects – currently in pre-alpha.

ALCHA aims to reduce FPGA project develop time by means of automation and abstraction, but without loosing the low-level control that HDLs, such as Verilog, provide.

Features

Compile to complete vendor-specific project from largely vendor-neutral source
Object oriented programming model
Proceedural state-machine programming model
Abstract data and signal types
Compile-time scripting
Automated timing-requirement generation
Bit- and timing-accurate circuit description

How to Build

When cloning the repository, remember to also clone the sub-modules.

Windows

Install TDM GCC MinGW version 5.1.0 or newer. Currently, only the 32-bit version links to the libraries provided.
Open a POSIX-like terminal (such as git bash).
Change directory to the project folder.
Run mingw32-make

Linux

Install a C++11 capable version of GCC.
Open a bash (or sh) terminal.
Install the development versions of libgmp, libmpfr and libfftw3. On Ubuntu, this can be achieved with:
- sudo apt-get install libgmp-dev
- sudo apt-get install libmpfr-dev
- sudo apt-get install libfftw3-dev
Change directory to the project folder.
Run make

Running Test Cases

To run the test cases, change directory into the Source folder, then run make test????. Replace the question-marks with the appropriate subfolder in the TestCases folder.

The functional test-cases at the moment are:

make testButtonsToLEDs: a minimal test-case used to test that the logic of the implemented architecture is working.
make testCombinational: A more thorough test of combination circuits (and various scripting structures).

More Information

Alcha was the subject of a PhD thesis.

See the Wiki for more information.