Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are reconfigurable devices which can outperform General Purpose Processors (GPPs) for applications exhibiting parallelism. Traditionally, FPGAs are programmed using Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as Verilog and VHDL. Using these languages generally offers the best performances but the programmer must be familiar with digital design. This creates a barrier for the software community to use FPGAs and limits their adoption as a computing solution. To make FPGAs accessible to both software and hardware programmers, a number of tools have been proposed both by academia and industry providing high-level programming environment. A widely used approach is to convert C-like languages to HDLs, making it easier for software programmers to use FPGAs. But these approaches generally do not provide performances on the par with those obtained with HDL languages. The primary reason is the inability of C-like approaches to express parallelism. Our claim is that in order to have a high level programming language for FPGAs as well as not to compromise on performance, a shift in programming paradigm is required. We think that the Dataflowow / actor programming model is a good candidate for this. This thesis explores the adoption of Dataflow / actor programming model for programming FPGAs. More precisely, we assess the suitability of CAPH, a domain-specific language based on this programming model for the description and implementation of stream-processing applications on FPGAs. The expressivity of the language and the efficiency of the generated code are assessed experimentally using a set of test bench applications ranging from very simple applications (basic image filtering) to more complex realistic applications such as motion detection, Connected Component Labeling (CCL) and JPEG encoder.
