An Interactive Design Environment for C-based High-level Synthesis

Much effort in RTL design has been devoted to developing “push-button” types of tools. However, given the highly complex nature, and lack of control on RTL design, push-button types of synthesis is not accepted by most designers. Interactive design space exploration with assistance of tools and algorithms can be more effective because it provides control of all steps of synthesis. In this paper, we propose an interactive RTL design environment, which enables designers to control design steps. In our interactive environment, the user can control the design process at every stage, observe the effects of design decisions, and manually override synthesis decisions at will. Finally, we present a set of experimental results that demonstrate the benefits of our approach. Our combination of automated tools and interactive control by the designer results in quickly generated RTL designs with better performance than fully-automatic results, comparable to fully manually optimized designs.