| Paradigm | Imperative (procedural, structured), concurrent |
|---|---|
| Designed by | Oxford University Computing Laboratory |
| Developer | ESL; Celoxica; Agility; Mentor Graphics; Siemens EDA |
| First appeared | 1996 |
| Stable release | v3.0
|
| Typing discipline | Static, manifest, nominal, inferred |
| OS | Cross-platform (multi-platform) |
| Filename extensions | .hcc, .hch |
| Website | eda |
| Major implementations | |
| Celoxica DK | |
| Influenced by | |
| C, CSP, occam | |
Handel-C is a high-level hardware description language aimed at low-level hardware and is most commonly used in programming FPGAs. Handel-C is to hardware design what the first high-level programming languages were to programming CPUs. It is a turing-complete rich subset of the C programming language, with an emphasis on parallel computing.
Unlike many other hardware design languages (HDL) that target a specific computer architecture Handel-C can be compiled to a number of HDLs and then synthesised to the corresponding hardware. This frees developers to concentrate on the programming task at hand rather than the idiosyncrasies of a specific design language and architecture.