Motivation To Adopt HLS

Verilog and VHDL have allowed vast ASICs to be designed, so in some sense they are successful. But improved languages are needed to meet the following EDA aims:

• Speed of design: time to market,
• Facilitate richer behavioural specification,
• Readily allow time/space folding experiments,
• Greater freedom and hence scope for optimisation in the compiler,
• Facilitate implementation of a formal specification,
• Facilitate proof of conformance to a specification,
• Allow rule-based programming (i.e. a logic-programming sub-language),
• Support modern synchronisation primitives (e.g. join patterns)
• Portability: can be compiled into software as well as into hardware.

New motivation: today, energy conservation is often more important than performance.

The Dark Silicon future makes custom and reconfigurable hardware more important than ever.