User needs

Abstract

One can see successful adoption in industry of innovative technologies mainly in the cases where they provide acceptable solution to very concrete problems that this industry is facing. High-level synthesis promises to be one of the solutions to cope with the significant increase in the demand for design productivity beyond the state-of-the-art methods and flows. It also offers an unparalleled possibility to explore the design space in an efficient way by dealing with higher abstraction levels and fast implementation ways to prove the feasibility of algorithms and enables optimisation of performances.Beyond the productivity improvement, which is of course very pertinent in the design practice, the system and SoC companies are more and more concerned with their overall capability to design highly complex systems providing sophisticated functions and services. High-level synthesis may considerably contribute to maintain such a design capability in the context of continuously increasing chip manufacturing capacities and ever growing customer demand for function-rich products. In this chapter three leading industrial users present their expectations with regard to the high-level synthesis technology and the results of their experiments in practical application of currently available HLS tools and flows. The users also draw conclusions on the future directions in which they wish to see the high-level synthesis evolves like multi-clock domain support, block interface synthesis, joint optimisation of the datapath and control logic, integration of automated testing to the generated hardware or efficient taking into account of the target implementation technology for ASICs and FPGAs in the synthesis process. © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.