| Abstract [eng] |
Everyone who develops hardware wants to do this as fast as possible and for low costs. Time to the market must be shortened because the competition is very substantial. This can be done by using special development software called high level synthesis tools. HLS tools automatically generate HDL RTL code and helps developers to get all possible architectures of project. HLS tools use an algorithmic C code as input information. There is the possibility for software engineers to develop hardware too. It seems that HLS is very good technology, but HLS tools are not widely used today. It must be found the reasons of this problem and opportunities how this problem can be solved. An experiment is made by solving this problem. A GSM LPC algorithm is written by hand from C description to VHDL RTL. This experiment explains problems of high level synthesis. With the purpose HLS tools to use widely, high level of abstraction (C/C++) code must be written with restrictions. There must be no pointer variables and pointer arithmetic, no recursion, no difficult operations, no dynamic memory allocation. Engineers have to think like hardware. |
