July 2000 Third Workshop on Attribute Grammars and their Applications WAGA 2000 Advances in Attribute Grammar Driven HardwareCompilation

High-level or behavioral synthesis of digital circuits ooers an eeective way to deal with the increasing complexity of digital hardware design. A high-level synthesis tool transforms an abstract algorithmic description into a detailed register transfer level implementation. Since most of the times the algorithmic description is given in textual form, high-level synthesis transformations share common aspects with traditional compiler transformations (the process is also called hardware compilation). As a consequence, hardware compilation can be performed using attribute grammars. However, since modern high-level synthesis transformations are of high complexity, advanced attribute evaluation techniques are required. This paper presents recent advances in hardware compilation under the FNC-2 attribute grammar system. It follows two diierent approaches. One that decorates the parse tree of the behavioral speciication with implementation details, taking advantage of the use of a deenition table, and one that constructs and decorates a new tree, which follows the structure of the corresponding data ow graph. Both approaches have been found to be exible and eecient in supporting future research eeorts in the eld.