High Level Synthesis

This book presents an excellent collection of contributions addressing different aspects of high-level synthesis from both industry and academia. It includes an overview of available EDA tool solutions and their applicability to design problems.

Are you an RTL or system designer that is currently using, moving, or planning to move to an HLS design environment? Finally, a comprehensive guide for designing hardware using C++ is here. Michael Fingeroff's High-Level Synthesis Blue Book presents the most effective C++ synthesis coding style for achieving high quality RTL. Master a totally new design methodology for coding increasingly complex designs! This book provides a step-by-step approach to using C++ as a hardware design language, including an introduction to the basics of HLS using concepts familiar to RTL designers. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand C++ examples, along with hardware and timing diagrams where appropriate. The book progresses from simple concepts such as sequential logic design to more complicated topics such as memory architecture and hierarchical sub-system design. Later chapters bring together many of the earlier HLS design concepts through their application in simplified design examples. These examples illustrate the fundamental principles behind C++ hardware design, which will translate to much larger designs. Although this book focuses primarily on C and C++ to present the basics of C++ synthesis, all of the concepts are equally applicable to SystemC when describing the core algorithmic part of a design. On completion of this book, readers should be well on their way to becoming experts in high-level synthesis.

Research on high-level synthesis started over twenty years ago, but lower-level tools were not available to seriously support the insertion of high-level synthesis into the mainstream design methodology. Since then, substantial progress has been made in formulating and understanding the basic concepts in high-level synthesis. Although many open problems remain, high-level synthesis has matured. High-Level Synthesis: Introduction to Chip and System Design presents a summary of the basic concepts and results and defines the remaining open problems. This is the first textbook on high-level synthesis and includes the basic concepts, the main algorithms used in high-level synthesis and a discussion of the requirements and essential issues for high-level synthesis systems and environments. A reference text like this will allow the high-level synthesis community to grow and prosper in the future.

This self-contained book addresses the need for analysis, characterization, estimation, and optimization of the various forms of power dissipation in the presence of process variations of nano-CMOS technologies. The authors show very large-scale integration (VLSI) researchers and engineers how to minimize the different types of power consumption of digital circuits. The material deals primarily with high-level (architectural or behavioral) energy dissipation.

Behavioral Synthesis: A Practical Guide to High-Level Design includes details on new material and new interpretations of old material with an emphasis on practical information. The intended audience is the ASIC (or high-end FPGA) designer who will be using behavioral synthesis, the manager who will be working with those designers, or the engineering student who is studying leading-edge design techniques. Today's designs are creating tremendous pressures for digital designers. Not only must they compress more functionality onto a single IC, but this has to be done on shorter schedules to stay ahead in extremely competitive markets. To meet these opposing demands, designers must work at a new, higher level of abstraction to efficiently make the kind of architectural decisions that are critical to the success of today's complex designs. In other words, they must include behavioral design in their flow. The biggest challenge to adopting behavioral design is changing the mindset of the designer. Instead of describing system functionality in great detail, the designer outlines the design in broader, more abstract terms. The ability to easily and efficiently consider multiple design alternatives over a wide range of cost and performance is an extremely persuasive reason to make this leap to a high level of abstraction. Designers that learn to think and work at the behavioral level will reap major benefits in the resultant quality of the final design. But such changes in methodology are difficult to achieve rapidly. Education is essential to making this transition. Many designers will recall the difficulty transitioning from schematic-based design to RTL design. Designers that were new to the technology often felt that they had not been told enough about how synthesis worked and that they were not taught how to effectively write HDL code that would synthesize efficiently. Using this unique book, a designer will understand what behavioral synthesis tools are doing (and why) and how to effectively describe their designs that they are appropriately synthesized. CD ROM INCLUDED! The accompanying CD-ROM contains the source code and test benches for the three case studies discussed in Chapters 14, 15 and 16.

High-Level Synthesis for Real-Time Digital Signal Processing is a comprehensive reference work for researchers and practicing ASIC design engineers. It focuses on methods for compiling complex, low to medium throughput DSP system, and on the implementation of these methods in the CATHEDRAL-II compiler. The emergence of independent silicon foundries, the reduced price of silicon real estate and the shortened processing turn-around time bring silicon technology within reach of system houses. Even for low volumes, digital systems on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are becoming an economically meaningful alternative for traditional boards with analogue and digital commodity chips. ASICs cover the application region where inefficiencies inherent to general-purpose components cannot be tolerated. However, full-custom handcrafted ASIC design is often not affordable in this competitive market. Long design times, a high development cost for a low production volume, the lack of silicon designers and the lack of suited design facilities are inherent difficulties to manual full-custom chip design. To overcome these drawbacks, complex systems have to be integrated in ASICs much faster and without losing too much efficiency in silicon area and operation speed compared to handcrafted chips. The gap between system design and silicon design can only be bridged by new design (CAD). The idea of a silicon compiler, translating a behavioural system specification directly into silicon, was born from the awareness that the ability to fabricate chips is indeed outrunning the ability to design them. At this moment, CAD is one order of magnitude behind schedule. Conceptual CAD is the keyword to mastering the design complexity in ASIC design and the topic of this book.

High-Level Synthesis Blue Book is now available in Japanese. This is the Japanese version of the book. Are you an RTL or system designer that is currently using, moving, or planning to move to an HLS design environment? Finally, a comprehensive guide for designing hardware using C++ is here. Michael Fingeroff's High-Level Synthesis Blue Book presents the most effective C++ synthesis coding style for achieving high quality RTL. Master a totally new design methodology for coding increasingly complex designs! This book provides a step-by-step approach to using C++ as a hardware design language, including an introduction to the basics of HLS using concepts familiar to RTL designers. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand C++ examples, along with hardware and timing diagrams where appropriate. The book progresses from simple concepts such as sequential logic design to more complicated topics such as memory architecture and hierarchical sub-system design. Later chapters bring together many of the earlier HLS design concepts through their application in simplified design examples. These examples illustrate the fundamental principles behind C++ hardware design, which will translate to much larger designs. Although this book focuses primarily on C and C++ to present the basics of C++ synthesis, all of the concepts are equally applicable to SystemC when describing the core algorithmic part of a design. On completion of this book, readers should be well on their way to becoming experts in high-level synthesis.

Given the growing size and heterogeneity of Systems on Chip (SOC), the design process from initial specification to chip fabrication has become increasingly complex. This growing complexity provides incentive for designers to use high-level languages such as C, SystemC, and SystemVerilog for system-level design. While a major goal of these high-level languages is to enable verification at a higher level of abstraction, allowing early exploration of system-level designs, the focus so far for validation purposes has been on traditional testing techniques such as random testing and scenario-based testing. This book focuses on high-level verification, presenting a design methodology that relies upon advances in synthesis techniques as well as on incremental refinement of the design process. These refinements can be done manually or through elaboration tools. This book discusses verification of specific properties in designs written using high-level languages, as well as checking that the refined implementations are equivalent to their high-level specifications. The novelty of each of these techniques is that they use a combination of formal techniques to do scalable verification of system designs completely automatically. The verification techniques presented in this book include methods for verifying properties of high-level designs and methods for verifying that the translation from high-level design to a low-level Register Transfer Language (RTL) design preserves semantics. Used together, these techniques guarantee that properties verified in the high-level design are preserved through the translation to low-level RTL.