Hardware Design Requires Hardware Design Languages

Electronic System Level (ESL) design is a rapidly involving and ever more important segment of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. While ESL is still in a relatively early stage of deployment, there are many experiences that have been garnered from careers in the register transfer level (RTL) market that are applicable to this evolving domain.

A couple of important lessons learned from the RTL space:

• Hardware design has become highly "language" oriented
• Description of hardware devices requires specific hardware-oriented constructs, including hierarchical blocks, communicating modules, time and concurrency
• Efficient synthesis of the hardware description language (HDL) is critical
• Simulations in new languages must coexist with existing intellectual property (IP) blocks
• Development and support of industry standard languages is essential

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a critical element of a long-term ESL strategy. It provides a logical path to silicon for those parts of a system that a design team will implement as custom blocks, as opposed to existing block implementations from either past designs or those commercially acquired.

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