I am looking at developing on an FPGA, but it would be easier for me to write the code in Python or Scala and have it converted to VHDL or Verilog.
I want to have many sensors hooked up to a device, and as the data comes in, calculations are done very quickly so it can be displayed on a video wall, so the FPGA would have as input dozens of sensors and several video controllers for the wall.
This is a library for code written in Scala. For this one I am curious if the code is written in Java and Scala would that affect what it generates.
http://simplifide.com/drupal6/
This is a python to VHDL converter.
With both of these I am curious as to the limitations.
I would prefer simplifide, as I am stronger at Scala than Python, but it seems that myhdl may be a more robust platform, just from some basic looking around.
UPDATE:
The reason for the FPGA is that it can do multiple tasks at one time very well, so when the data comes in, depending on the needs of users, based on the experiment, it would be easy to change the code on the FPGA to be able to adapt to the needs.
So, for example, if you have 8 x 3 different weather sensors on each floor of an office building, so there are temperature, wind speed, barometric sensors (8 of each sensor one each floor), and add sensors to test the deformation of the walls, then a real-time interface to read these in at the same time and keep updating the visual display may be helpful.
This is a made up example, but it would explain why an FPGA would be useful, otherwise I would need many different DSPs and then feed that into a computer to do the visual display, whereas an FPGA can do is faster, since it is hardware, with lower power needs.
There are two open-source libraries that can help make this easier in development, but I am not certain which would be a better platform to use to convert a program to VHDL/Verilog.
This is just one example. If I want to do a quantum circuit simulation on an FPGA, as this article suggests (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/nano/documents/Radecka%20-%20FPGA%20Emulation%20of%20Quantum%20Circuits.pdf) then it would be easier to do this as a program, than building up a large circuit by hand.
If you can afford it, I don’t think anything will make your life easier than National Instruments’ FPGA add-on for LabView. The visual environment of LabView is a reasonable fit for FPGA programming, and it takes care of many of the annoying details for you (unless you must worry about them as part of the algorithm, e.g. by building pipelines to hit your clock speed targets). Also, you may find that NI’s real-time (non-FPGA) or DSP or DAQ or other solutions are adequate for your needs.