A generic platform for the SoC implementation of grammar-based applications

In this paper a generic platform for the hardware implementation of grammar-based applications is presented. The proposed platform, given the specification of the application in the formalism of Attribute Grammars, automatically produces the necessary hardware modules for the syntactic and semantic analysis of input strings belonging to that grammar. The produced implementation tackles with the recognition task of the input string, using Earley’s parallel parsing algorithm. The attribute evaluation makes usage of a stack-based methodology. The hardware modules are described in Verilog Hardware Description Language (Verilog HDL) and synthesized in a Xilinx Virtex-5 ML506 FPGA. Finally, two examples from the area of arithmetic expression evaluation and from the question answering area are given, for the illustration of the proposed system.