ABSTRACT
The history of high-level synthesis (HLS) is long. HLS established its status as an active research topic in the EDA community by the late 1970s and was often introduced as “the next big thing” by the early 1990s, following the significant and very successful adoption of logic synthesis. This chapter presents technical details of a state-of-the-art HLS technology. When using HLS, designers can specify the intention by focusing only on a few key aspects of the architectures while leaving the tools to fill out the details automatically. Some of the abstraction in HLS comes from the input language. HLS tools help register-transfer level designers by automatically optimizing resource sharing. This makes it possible to better encapsulate the functionality, making it easier to understand and extend. HLS tools allow the designer to write in the more natural procedural way commonly used in software. HLS tools can automatically construct and implement control finite-state machine from such a description.
