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).
Read more about this topic: Hardware Description Language
Famous quotes containing the words high, level and/or synthesis:
“The disinterest [of my two great-aunts] in anything that had to do with high society was such that their sense of hearing ... put to rest its receptor organs and allowed them to suffer the true beginnings of atrophy.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“To punish drug takers is like a drunk striking the bleary face it sees in the mirror. Drugs will not be brought under control until society itself changes, enabling men to use them as primitive man did: welcoming the visions they provided not as fantasies, but as intimations of a different, and important, level of reality.”
—Brian Inglis (b. 1916)
“If in the opinion of the Tsars authors were to be the servants of the state, in the opinion of the radical critics writers were to be the servants of the masses. The two lines of thought were bound to meet and join forces when at last, in our times, a new kind of regime the synthesis of a Hegelian triad, combined the idea of the masses with the idea of the state.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)