High-Level Design of Digital Logic Hardware

With the aid of electronic design automation (EDA) computer-aided design (CAD) tools, it is now possible for engineers to design highly complex digital logic hardware circuits using only high-level circuit descriptions. Such EDA tools include software tools for graphical design input, hardware description language support, simulation, digital logic synthesis, and the creation of configuration (or netlist) files for customizable hardware platforms. A high-level design approach can be used with the aid of such tools as long as the desired behavior of the target circuit can be described in an unambiguous manner. Given a general design problem, it may be solvable using software or hardware methods. A customized hardware solution, however, has an advantage over a software solution in terms of performance and cost, and in some cases may be the only viable approach. Thus, this paper describes a general approach for taking a software algorithm, converting it into a high-level design description, and then using that design description to automatically produce customized hardware circuits with the aid of EDA CAD tools. Keywords—Algorithm, Algorithmic State Machine (ASM), Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Hardware Description Language (HDL), High-Level Design. ∗This work was supported in part by the IC Design Education Center (IDEC).