Christiaan Baaij

Making circuit design fun for programmers

Christiaan is a key contributor to the functional hardware description language called Clash, a language that borrows both the syntax and semantics from Haskell.  Christiaan has been programming in Haskell since 2009 when he co-created the first prototype of the Clash compiler and was fortunate to be welcomed by the community at the 2009 Haskell Symposium in Edinburgh and present that first prototype.  Clash was also the topic of Christiaan's PhD thesis, for which he graduated from the University of Twente in 2015.  In 2016, he co-founded QBayLogic B.V., an FPGA design house where he and a small team create custom FPGA solutions, using Clash, for QBayLogic's worldwide clientele.

KEYNOTE: Building a Haskell-to-Hardware compiler: Theory & Practice

Clash is a functional hardware description language, but it’s also just a combination of a regular Haskell library with type and function definitions for circuit design and a compiler that translates Haskell programs to digital circuits.  

In this talk, Christiaan will explain how you can interpret a Haskell program as a digital circuit, the theory behind the inner workings of the Clash compiler, and all the practical problems that were overcome while building the compiler. At the end of the talk, Christiaan will also highlight some large outstanding issues and ideas on how to solve them.

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