Design Methodologies For Vlsi And Computer Architecture

System Synthesis with VHDL

Embedded systems are usually composed of several interacting components such as custom or application specific processors, ASICs, memory blocks, and the associated communication infrastructure. The development of tools to support the design of such systems requires a further step from high-level synthesis towards a higher abstraction level. The lack of design tools accepting a system-level specification of a complete system, which may include both hardware and software components, is one of the major bottlenecks in the design of embedded systems. Thus, more and more research efforts have been spent on issues related to system-level synthesis. This book addresses the two most active research areas of design automation today: high-level synthesis and system-level synthesis. In particular, a transformational approach to synthesis from VHDL specifications is described. System Synthesis with VHDL provides a coherent view of system synthesis which includes the high-level and the system-level synthesis tasks. VHDL is used as a specification language and several issues concerning the use of VHDL for high-level and system-level synthesis are discussed. These include aspects from the compilation of VHDL into an internal design representation to the synthesis of systems specified as interacting VHDL processes. The book emphasizes the use of a transformational approach to system synthesis. A Petri net based design representation is rigorously defined and used throughout the book as a basic vehicle for illustration of transformations and other design concepts. Iterative improvement heuristics, such as tabu search, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, are discussed and illustrated as strategies which are used to guide the optimization process in a transformation-based design environment. Advanced topics, including hardware/software partitioning, test synthesis and low power synthesis are discussed from the perspective of a transformational approach to system synthesis. System Synthesis with VHDL can be used for advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in the area of design automation and, more specifically, of high-level and system-level synthesis. At the same time the book is intended for CAD developers and researchers as well as industrial designers of digital systems who are interested in new algorithms and techniques supporting modern design tools and methodologies.

Fundamentals and Standards in Hardware Description Languages

The second half of this century will remain as the era of proliferation of electronic computers. They did exist before, but they were mechanical. During next century they may perform other mutations to become optical or molecular or even biological. Actually, all these aspects are only fancy dresses put on mathematical machines. This was always recognized to be true in the domain of software, where "machine" or "high level" languages are more or less rigourous, but immaterial, variations of the universaly accepted mathematical language aimed at specifying elementary operations, functions, algorithms and processes. But even a mathematical machine needs a physical support, and this is what hardware is all about. The invention of hardware description languages (HDL's) in the early 60's, was an attempt to stay longer at an abstract level in the design process and to push the stage of physical implementation up to the moment when no more technology independant decisions can be taken. It was also an answer to the continuous, exponential growth of complexity of systems to be designed. This problem is common to hardware and software and may explain why the syntax of hardware description languages has followed, with a reasonable delay of ten years, the evolution of the programming languages: at the end of the 60's they were" Algol like" , a decade later "Pascal like" and now they are "C or ADA-like". They have also integrated the new concepts of advanced software specification languages.

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