High-Level Synthesis Made Easy Book Overview

This book is intended to teach anyone, either someone with deep hardware development skills, or someone with little prior hardware design knowledge alike to learn how to design and verify dedicated hardware modules using HLS. HLS converts untimed or partially timed behavioral descriptions into efficient hardware descriptions in either Verilog or VHDL that can in turn be further synthesized into gate netlists through logic synthesis. The word efficient is extremely important as nobody would build a integrated circuit (IC) using HLS if the generated circuit is larger, slower and consumes more power than using traditional methods based on low-level Hardware Description Languages (HDLs).

The book will start by describing what HLS is and its main benefits. It will then cover the theory behind HLS. Basically I will answer the question of how an untimed behavioral description that was originally intended to be compiled to machine code to be executed by a Central Processing Unit (CPU) is converted into a dedicated hardware unit. The book will cover different types of optimizations to allow the designer to generated the hardware circuit within the intended constraints, and finally it will cover different input languages and how they differ. In particular ANSI-C and SystemC. I share this book with the hope that you might find it useful. Happy reading.

High-Level Synthesis: Applications Book Overview

This book is intended as a continuation of that book and goes over some unique advantages of raising the level of VLSI design abstraction from the Register Transfer Level (RTL) to the behavioral level and more importantly how to leverage these advantaged in different domains. In particular, low-power design, fault-tolerance, and hardware security. I also cover how legacy hardware circuits given in Verilog or VHDL can be modernize thought HLS.

Much of the work presented in this book was done by graduate students at my lab during the past 15 years. I have to therefore dearly thank them for it.

The book will start by describing reviewing what HLS is and where it fits in a typical VLSI design flow. It will then cover low-power design, thermal-aware design, hardware security, fault tolerance and finally covering how HLS can help to modernize legacy hardware designs.