FSMD-Based Hardware Accelerators for FPGAs

Abstract

Current VLSI technology allows the design of sophisticated digital systems with escalated demands in performance and power/energy consumption. The annual increase of chip complexity is 58%, while human designers productivity increase is limited to 21% per annum (ITRS, 2011). The growing technology-productivity gap is probably the most important problem in the industrial development of innovative products. A dramatic increase in designer productivity is only possible through the adoption of methodologies/tools that raise the design abstraction level, ingeniously hiding low-level, time-consuming, error-prone details. New EDAmethodologies aim to generate digital designs fromhigh-level descriptions, a process called High-Level Synthesis (HLS) (Coussy & Morawiec, 2008) or else hardware compilation (Wirth, 1998). The input to this process is an algorithmic description (for example in C/C++/SystemC) generating synthesizable and verifiable Verilog/VHDL designs (IEEE, 2006; 2009).