[Oberon] Active Cells

[Felix Friedrich]

Dear all,
since there is some discussion ongoing on this list regarding 
translation of Oberon to VHDL / Verilog, I would like to point out that 
we at ETH do already since some years now focus on software-hardware 
co-design with a programming model derived from Oberon / Active Oberon 
that we call "Active Cells". We added to the concept of modules and 
(active) objects the concept of so called cells, separate components 
that are mapped to processors in a distributed system on chip on an 
FPGA. Hardware can be built from high level programs "on button push". 
As one of many consequences the notion of an Operating System nearly 
vanishes. No interrupts, no scheduling overhead since there is one 
processor core per task allocated; no shared memory, etc. The Fox Oberon 
compiler tool-chain has been extended in order to support hardware 
generation via Verilog. Off-the shelf commercial tools are used for the 
synthesis part.

An early paper can be downloaded from 
http://www.nativesystems.inf.ethz.ch/pub/Main/FelixFriedrichPublications/ActiveCells.pdf, 
more recent results can be inferred from the slides of a recent workshop 
on 
http://www-oldurls.inf.ethz.ch/personal/felixf/WorkshopTajpeh/SystemsOnChipWorkshopFriedrich.pdf. 


Let me please also note that we are working on graphical support for the 
tools and many more interesting things to come. The toolchain is under 
active development at ETH Zurich and Uni Basel. It has proven its 
usefulness also in the commercial setup. It is needless to say that 
Prof. Wirth's work on FPGA processor design, compiler construction, 
language design (etc.) was very influential for this work.

Felix