Fundamentals of ESL Synthesis

Electronic System Level (ESL) design is a large, complex and somewhat confusing domain based on the introduction of several new levels of model abstraction and many more sub-flows and methodologies for both design and verification. While many aspects of ESL are still nascent, some parts of it are maturing quickly and they promise to provide significant gains for those who adopt them.

In this course we will explore some of the fundamentals of ESL with particular emphasis on one of the most mature areas, namely high-level synthesis of the hardware portions of the system. While this area is maturing, different vendors have chosen different languages as their starting point and we will explore some of the tradeoffs that this makes.

The course will then provide some technical insight into how high-level synthesis operates and the kinds of transformations that they are capable of making. This will enable you to get the most out of the tools and to understand the results that they produce.

Finally the course will provide a brief example using the PICO Extreme synthesis tool from Synfora to synthesize an adaptable high-definition scaler into an FPGA based solution.