Overview of high level synthesis tools

Abstract

High Level Synthesis takes an abstract behavioural or algorithmic description of a digital system and creates a register transfer level structure that realises the described behaviour. Various methodologies have been developed to perform such synthesis tasks. This paper presents the different HLS concepts used in the current leading tools. It makes a comparison between the different approaches and highlights their advantages and limitations. We also present a high level synthesis example. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA.