Formal generation of synthesizable RTL from regular programs
Michael F. Dossis · 2011
The complexity of the contemporary digital circuits and systems, determines the need for higher specification abstraction and automatic circuit synthesis techniques to be adopted. A prototype high level synthesis framework is presented here, that automatically generates synthesizable RTL code from unaltered, high level programs. The framework is developed using compiler-generator and logic programming (thus formal) techniques, and it utilizes a patented intermediate compilation format to retain the algorithmic semantics of the source programs and allow for compiler transformations. The synthesis framework is evaluated via statistics from a number of real-life applications. The performance optimization of the compiled applications, including an MPEG engine, underlines the quality of the prototype design framework.