The growing proliferation of FPGAs and High-level Synthesis (HLS) tools has
led to a large interest in designing hardware accelerators for complex
operations and algorithms. However, existing HLS toolflows typically require a
significant amount of user knowledge or training to be effective in both
industrial and research applications. In this paper, we propose using the Julia
language as the basis for an HLS tool. The Julia HLS tool aims to decrease the
barrier to entry for hardware acceleration by taking advantage of the
readability of the Julia language and by allowing the use of the existing large
library of standard mathematical functions written in Julia. We present a
prototype Julia HLS tool, written in Julia, that transforms Julia code to VHDL.
We highlight how features of Julia and its compiler simplified the creation of
this tool, and we discuss potential directions for future work.