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.

Development is happening in the develop
branch, so it's best to track it instead of master. The latest stuff is in feature branches.

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

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

Linux

1. Install a C++11 capable version of GCC.
2. Open a bash (or sh) terminal.
3. 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
4. Change directory to the project folder.
5. 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.