"Manual coding of hardware circuits is specialised and time-consuming. But the energy saved using custom hardware compared with conventional processing, whether for video compression on a mobile phone or weather forecasting in the cloud (sic), has become very attractive. Performance can also be much higher, especially for CPU-bound (i.e. not memory-bound or I/O-bound) applications, such as encryption and prime-number factoring. And for automated stock trading the achievable low-latency is another key benefit. So today, we see a number of drivers for taking easy-to-write software and mapping it to a hardware circuit. This process is generally called `High-level Synthesis' or HLS." - David J Greaves, 2017.