Abstract not found

Automated design tools help to capture the benefits of customization in embedded system design while not exceeding design budgets. Such design tools must understand and exploit the hierarchical structure of design spaces, because systems of any significant complexity typically consist of components (subsystems). In order to reduce the design cost for such systems, designers develop the best component designs and restrict the number of system designs that they evaluate to those formed by combining these component designs.

Scheduling, resource allocation and binding are traditionally classified as behavioral synthesis tasks. However, advanced RTL synthesis tools could execute the last two tasks. Hence, an overlap of functionality will be found in most new design environments. In this paper, we present a new design flow with flexible frontiers between behavioral and RTL synthesis tools. Our results show that it is worth to give the designer this extended degree of freedom, since the best solution is not always the result of a specific design flow. 1. Introduction Behavioral and Register-Transfer Level (RTL) synthesis work on different levels of design abstraction. With synchronous digital systems, the essential differences between these levels of abstraction are the synchronization points used [1]. At the behavioral level of abstraction, the design is described as an algorithm. Synchronization points are the interactions of the system with the external environment (I/O operations). In VHDL, this corresp...

Objective of the methodology presented in this paper is to perform design space exploration on a high level of abstraction by applying high-level transformations. The paper concentrates on algorithmic approaches on controlling the iterative process of transformation selection. A novel modular algorithm for transformation control is presented and its effectiveness is experimentally validated. In combination with a large set of transformation algorithms and mechanisms for high-level estimation of transformation quality, there results a methodology for automated high-level design space exploration. All the concepts are summarized in a software tool called ExTra (Design Space Exploration Using Transformations).

Scheduling, resource allocation and binding are traditionally classified as behavioral synthesis tasks. However, advanced RTL synthesis tools could execute the last two tasks. Hence, an overlap of functionality will be found in most new design environments. In this paper, we present a new design flow with flexible frontiers between behavioral and RTL synthesis tools. Our results show that it is worth to give the designer this extended degree of freedom, since the best solution is not always the result of a specific design flow.