This paper introduces hot potato high level synthesis transformation techniques. These techniques add deflection operations in the behavioral description of a computation in such a way that the requirements for two important components of the final implementation cost, the number of registers and the number of interconnects, are significantly reduced. Moreover, it is shown how hot potato techniques can be effectively used during high level synthesis to minimize the partial scan overhead to make the synthesized design testable. The paper presents theoretical foundations, efficient algorithms and experimental results which indicate the wide application range and effectiveness of the new transformation technique for behavioral level synthesis. 1.0 Introduction 1.1 Transformations in High Level Synthesis Computational transformations are alternations in the structure of control-data flow graph (CDFG) so that the functionality of the initial specification is maintained [Fis88, Wal91]. Tran...