An Introduction to High-Level Synthesis
High-Level Synthesis An Introduction to High-Level Synthesis Philippe Coussy Michael Meredith Universite´ de Bretagne-Sud, Lab-STICC Forte Design Systems Daniel D. Gajski Andres Takach University of California, Irvine Mentor Graphics today would even think of program- Editor’s note: ming a complex software application High-level synthesis raises the design abstraction level and allows rapid gener- solely by using an assembly language. ation of optimized RTL hardware for performance, area, and power require- In the hardware domain, specification ments. This article gives an overview of state-of-the-art HLS techniques and languages and design methodologies tools. 1,2 ÀÀTim Cheng, Editor in Chief have evolved similarly. For this reason, until the late 1960s, ICs were designed, optimized, and laid out by hand. Simula- THE GROWING CAPABILITIES of silicon technology tion at the gate level appeared in the early 1970s, and and the increasing complexity of applications in re- cycle-based simulation became available by 1979. Tech- cent decades have forced design methodologies niques introduced during the 1980s included place-and- and tools to move to higher abstraction levels. Raising route, schematic circuit capture, formal verification, the abstraction levels and accelerating automation of and static timing analysis. Hardware description lan- both the synthesis and the verification processes have guages (HDLs), such as Verilog (1986) and VHDL for this reason always been key factors in the evolu- (1987), have enabled wide adoption of simulation tion of the design process, which in turn has allowed tools. These HDLs have also served as inputs to logic designers to explore the design space efficiently and synthesis tools leading to the definition of their synthe- rapidly.
[Show full text]