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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.
- Analysists, such as A DeHon, extrapolate that reconfigurable spatial computing will become better than Von Neumann in general.
New motivation: today, energy conservation is often more important than performance.
The Dark Silicon future makes custom and reconfigurable hardware more important than ever.