Design Procedure Based on VHDL Language Transformations

Abstract

One of the major problems within the VHDL based behavioral synthesis is to start the design on higher abstraction level than the register transfer level (RTL). VHDL semantics was designed strictly for simulation, therefore it was not considered as high-level synthesis language. A novel synthesis procedure was developed, which uses the methodology of high level synthesis. It starts from an abstract VHDL model and produces an RTL VHDL description through successive language transformations while preserving the VHDL standard simulation semantics. The steps of the synthesis do not use graph representation or other meta-language, but apply the standard VHDL only. This VHDL representation is simulatable and accessible, functional verification can be performed by simulation at any time, and the simulation results can be used to guide the synthesis process. The output VHDL format is suitable to continue the design flow with RTL based synthesis tools.