Automatic Identification of Parallelism in Handel-C

High level hardware design languages are making it possible for people with little background in hardware design to create their own custom hardware. This allows software designers to begin looking beyond general purpose computing into the realm of customized hardware in order to increase the performance of their applications. The ease with which hardware can be developed using hardware definition languages comes with a cost. Developers accustomed to working in software environments may have issues dealing with some of the more complex facets of hardware design, such as exploiting parallelism. This work aims to alleviate some of the frustration that may occur when attempting to identify and exploit parallelism in a hardware design by providing a set of tools that can automatically identify parallelism in Handel-C hardware designs.