Hardware Design Requires Hardware Design Languages

By Sean Dart, Forte Design Systems
Embedded.com (04/20/09, 07:27:00 PM EDT)

Electronic System Level (ESL) design is a rapidly involving and ever more important segment of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. While ESL is still in a relatively early stage of deployment, there are many experiences that have been garnered from careers in the register transfer level (RTL) market that are applicable to this evolving domain.

A couple of important lessons learned from the RTL space:

Hardware design has become highly "language" oriented
Description of hardware devices requires specific hardware-oriented constructs, including hierarchical blocks, communicating modules, time and concurrency
Efficient synthesis of the hardware description language (HDL) is critical
Simulations in new languages must coexist with existing intellectual property (IP) blocks
Development and support of industry standard languages is essential

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a critical element of a long-term ESL strategy. It provides a logical path to silicon for those parts of a system that a design team will implement as custom blocks, as opposed to existing block implementations from either past designs or those commercially acquired.

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