Rapid advances in microelectronic integration and the advent of Systems-on-Chip have fueled the need for high-level synthesis, i.e., an automated approach to the synthesis of hardware from behavioral descriptions. SPARK: A Parallelizing Approach to the High - Level Synthesis of Digital Circuits presents a novel approach to the high-level synthesis of digital circuits -- that of parallelizing high-level synthesis (PHLS). This approach uses aggressive code parallelizing and code motion techniques to discover circuit optimization opportunities beyond what is possible with traditional high-level synthesis. This PHLS approach addresses the problems of the poor quality of synthesis results and the lack of controllability over the transformations applied during the high-level synthesis of system descriptions with complex control flows, that is, with nested conditionals and loops. Also described are speculative code motion techniques and dynamic compiler transformations that optimize the circuit quality in terms of cycle time, circuit size and interconnect costs. We describe the SPARK parallelizing high-level synthesis framework in which we have implemented these techniques and demonstrate the utility of SPARK's PHLS approach using designs derived from multimedia and image processing applications. We also present a case study of an instruction length decoder derived from the Intel Pentium-class of microprocessors. This case study serves as an example of a typical microprocessor functional block with complex control flow and demonstrates how our techniques are useful for such designs. SPARK: A Parallelizing Approach to the High - Level Synthesis of Digital Circuits is targeted mainly to embedded system designers and researchers. This includes people working on design and design automation. The book is useful for researchers and design automation engineers who wish to understand how the main problems hindering the adoption of high-level synthesis among designers.

This book presents an excellent collection of contributions addressing different aspects of high-level synthesis from both industry and academia. It includes an overview of available EDA tool solutions and their applicability to design problems.

Presenting a comprehensive overview of the design automation algorithms, tools, and methodologies used to design integrated circuits, the Electronic Design Automation for Integrated Circuits Handbook is available in two volumes. The first volume, EDA for IC System Design, Verification, and Testing, thoroughly examines system-level design, microarchitectural design, logical verification, and testing. Chapters contributed by leading experts authoritatively discuss processor modeling and design tools, using performance metrics to select microprocessor cores for IC designs, design and verification languages, digital simulation, hardware acceleration and emulation, and much more. Save on the complete set.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Reconfigurable Computing, ARC 2006, held in Delft, The Netherlands, in March 2006. The 22 revised full papers and 35 revised short papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 95 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications, power, image processing, organization and architecture, networks and communication, security, and tools.

This book provides techniques to tackle the design challenges raised by the increasing diversity and complexity of emerging, heterogeneous architectures for embedded systems. It describes an approach based on techniques from software engineering called aspect-oriented programming, which allow designers to control today’s sophisticated design tool chains, while maintaining a single application source code. Readers are introduced to the basic concepts of an aspect-oriented, domain specific language that enables control of a wide range of compilation and synthesis tools in the partitioning and mapping of an application to a heterogeneous (and possibly multi-core) target architecture. Several examples are presented that illustrate the benefits of the approach developed for applications from avionics and digital signal processing. Using the aspect-oriented programming techniques presented in this book, developers can reuse extensive sections of their designs, while preserving the original application source-code, thus promoting developer productivity as well as architecture and performance portability. Describes an aspect-oriented approach for the compilation and synthesis of applications targeting heterogeneous embedded computing architectures. Includes examples using an integrated tool chain for compilation and synthesis. Provides validation and evaluation for targeted reconfigurable heterogeneous architectures. Enables design portability, given changing target devices· Allows developers to maintain a single application source code when targeting multiple architectures.

This book presents novel research techniques, algorithms, methodologies and experimental results for high level power estimation and power aware high-level synthesis. Readers will learn to apply such techniques to enable design flows resulting in shorter time to market and successful low power ASIC/FPGA design.

This book makes powerful Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and reconfigurable technology accessible to software engineers by covering different state-of-the-art high-level synthesis approaches (e.g., OpenCL and several C-to-gates compilers). It introduces FPGA technology, its programming model, and how various applications can be implemented on FPGAs without going through low-level hardware design phases. Readers will get a realistic sense for problems that are suited for FPGAs and how to implement them from a software designer’s point of view. The authors demonstrate that FPGAs and their programming model reflect the needs of stream processing problems much better than traditional CPU or GPU architectures, making them well-suited for a wide variety of systems, from embedded systems performing sensor processing to large setups for Big Data number crunching. This book serves as an invaluable tool for software designers and FPGA design engineers who are interested in high design productivity through behavioural synthesis, domain-specific compilation, and FPGA overlays. Introduces FPGA technology to software developers by giving an overview of FPGA programming models and design tools, as well as various application examples; Provides a holistic analysis of the topic and enables developers to tackle the architectural needs for Big Data processing with FPGAs; Explains the reasons for the energy efficiency and performance benefits of FPGA processing; Provides a user-oriented approach and a sense for where and how to apply FPGA technology.

Embedded systems are nearly ubiquitous, and books on individual topics or components of embedded systems are equally abundant. Unfortunately, for those designers who thirst for knowledge of the big picture of embedded systems there is not a drop to drink. Until now. The Embedded Systems Handbook is an oasis of information, offering a mix of basic a

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Reconfigurable Computing: Architectures, Tools and Applications, ARC 2010, held in Bangkok Thailand, in March 2010. The 42 papers presented, consisting of 26 full and 16 short papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The topics covered are practical applications of the RC technology, RC architectures, TC design methodologies and tools, and RC education.

Visit the authors' companion site! http://www.electronicsystemlevel.com/ - Includes interactive forum with the authors!Electronic System Level (ESL) design has mainstreamed – it is now an established approach at most of the world's leading system-on-chip (SoC) design companies and is being used increasingly in system design. From its genesis as an algorithm modeling methodology with 'no links to implementation', ESL is evolving into a set of complementary methodologies that enable embedded system design, verification and debug through to the hardware and software implementation of custom SoC, system-on-FPGA, system-on-board, and entire multi-board systems. This book arises from experience the authors have gained from years of work as industry practitioners in the Electronic System Level design area; they have seen "SLD" or "ESL" go through many stages and false starts, and have observed that the shift in design methodologies to ESL is finally occurring. This is partly because of ESL technologies themselves are stabilizing on a useful set of languages being standardized (SystemC is the most notable), and use models are being identified that are beginning to get real adoption. ESL DESIGN & VERIFICATION offers a true prescriptive guide to ESL that reviews its past and outlines the best practices of today.Table of ContentsCHAPTER 1: WHAT IS ESL? CHAPTER 2: TAXONOMY AND DEFINITIONS FOR THE ELECTRONIC SYSTEM LEVEL CHAPTER 3: EVOLUTION OF ESL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 4: WHAT ARE THE ENABLERS OF ESL? CHAPTER 5: ESL FLOW CHAPTER 6: SPECIFICATIONS AND MODELING CHAPTER 7: PRE-PARTITIONING ANALYSIS CHAPTER 8: PARTITIONING CHAPTER 9: POST-PARTITIONING ANALYSIS AND DEBUG CHAPTER 10: POST-PARTITIONING VERIFICATION CHAPTER 11: HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION CHAPTER 12: SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION CHAPTER 13: USE OF ESL FOR IMPLEMENTATION VERIFICATION CHAPTER 14: RESEARCH, EMERGING AND FUTURE PROSPECTS APPENDIX: LIST OF ACRONYMS* Provides broad, comprehensive coverage not available in any other such book * Massive global appeal with an internationally recognised author team * Crammed full of state of the art content from notable industry experts