Hardware Description Language - High Level Synthesis

High Level Synthesis

In an attempt to reduce the complexity of designing in HDLs, which have been compared to the equivalent of assembly languages, there are moves to raise the abstraction level of the design, a sub-field called high-level synthesis. Companies such as Cadence, Synopsys and Agility Design Solutions are promoting SystemC as a way to combine high level languages with concurrency models to allow faster design cycles for FPGAs than is possible using traditional HDLs. Approaches based on standard C or C++ (with libraries or other extensions allowing parallel programming) are found in the Catapult C tools from Mentor Graphics, the Impulse C tools from Impulse Accelerated Technologies, and the free and open-source ROCCC 2.0 tools from Jacquard Computing Inc. Annapolis Micro Systems, Inc.'s CoreFire Design Suite and National Instruments LabVIEW FPGA provide a graphical dataflow approach to high-level design entry and languages such as SystemVerilog, SystemVHDL, and Handel-C seek to accomplish the same goal, but are aimed at making existing hardware engineers more productive versus making FPGAs more accessible to existing software engineers. It is also possible to design hardware modules using MATLAB and Simulink using tool HDL Coder from Mathworks or Xilinx System Generator XSG from Xilinx (formerly Accel DSP).