2015 Reports

Hardware in Haskell: Implementing Memories in a Stream-Based World

Townsend, Richard Morse; Kim, Martha Allen; Edwards, Stephen A.

Recursive functions and data types pose significant challenges for a Haskell-to-hardware compiler. Directly translating these structures yields infinitely large circuits; a subtler approach is required. We propose a sequence of abstraction-lowering transformations that exposes time and memory in a Haskell program, producing a simpler form for hardware translation. This paper outlines these transformations on a specific example; future research will focus on generalizing and automating them in our group's compiler.