High-Level Synthesis

Implement algorithms in ASICs or FPGAs from high levels of abstraction

High-level synthesis is the process of converting a high-abstraction-level description of a design to a register-transfer-level (RTL) description for input to traditional ASIC and FPGA implementation workflows. This high-level design description can be expressed using a variety of methods, depending on the high-level synthesis tool, while the generated RTL is expressed as synthesizable Verilog® or VHDL®.

Working at a high level of abstraction lets hardware designers focus on developing the functionality in the context of a hardware architecture that meets their project requirements. Since many ASIC and FPGA designs start as algorithms in MATLAB® and Simulink®, these are natural environments to perform this design and verification.

With high-level synthesis, hardware designers can focus at a high level without implementation detail enables easy adjustment to changes, reuse across projects, and more productive functional verification.

High-level synthesis does require some amount of hardware architecture detail, such as parallelism, some notion of timing where appropriate, and hardware data types, which are usually fixed point. Most high-level synthesis users rely on graphical environments such as Simulink to visualize the architecture and data flow. Some high-level synthesis offerings such as HDL CoderTM offer automatic fixed-point conversion or even RTL implementation of native floating-point operations.

Hardware designers can also use:

  • HDL Coder™ to automatically generate synthesizable Verilog or VHDL code from Simulink and MATLAB for implementing hardware designs
  • Fixed-Point DesignerTM to analyze floating-point simulations, propose fixed-point data types to accommodate the precision and ranges seen during simulation, and manage the process of applying proposed or adjusted fixed-point types
  • HDL Verifier™ to verify that HDL implementations from high-level synthesis —either in RTL or as netlists—are functionally correct implementations of the MATLAB code or Simulink models that describe algorithms
  • Simulink verification, validation, and test products to add test suite automation, formal verification, coverage, and requirements validation to high-level design and verification

See also: HDL Coder, HDL Verifier, Fixed-Point Designer