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:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
—Bible: New Testament St. Paul, in Ephesians, 6:12.
St. Paul’s words were used by William Blake as an epigraph to The Four Zoas (c. 1800)
“To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)