Motivation

Why hardware synthesis?

VLSI designers constantly find themselves in a difficult situation. On the one hand, buyers ask for microelectronic products that integrate more and more functions on a single chip. Following Moore's law, fabrication technology has always supported this aspiration by quadrupling the achievable circuit complexity every three years or so. Market pressure, on the other hand, vetoes a proportional dilation of product development times. Worse than this, time to market is even supposed to shrink. As a consequence, design productivity must constantly improve.

Hardware description languages (HDLs) and design automation come to the rescue in three ways: they

• Exonerate designers from having to deal with low-level details by moving design entry to more abstract levels,

• Allow designers to focus more strongly on functionality as synthesis tools construct the necessary circuits along with their structural and physical views automatically, and

• Facilitate design reuse by capturing a circuit description in a parametrized technology- and platform-independent form (as opposed to schematic diagrams, for instance).

Today, the transition from structural to physical is largely automated in digital VLSI design. The transition from purely behavioral to structural has not yet reached the same maturity, but HDL synthesis is routinely used for turning register transfer level (RTL) descriptions into gate-level networks that are then processed further with the aid of cell-based design automation software. A digital HDL essentially must be able to describe how subcircuits interconnect to form larger circuits and how those individual subcircuits behave functionally and timingwise.