On the use of VHDL-based behavioral synthesis for telecom ASIC design

Abstract

VHDGbased behavioral synthesis is appearing on the market but it still has to prove that it can have a significant impact. In the past, most applications for behavioral synthesis came from the DSP area and from the academic world. In contrast, this paper describes the results of an investigation and evaluation of several behavioral synthesis tools, carried out on recent designs of Alcatel-Bell, leading to a more detailed study of relevant industrial telecom non-DSP circuits, that were suitable for behavioral synthesis.From our expertise in telecom system hurdware design, we can conclude that, taking into account that today worldwide about 6,000 licenses for logic synthesis are in use, there is distinctly a market potential for design-entries at higher levels of abstraction, due to the still increasing design complexities that can be expected in the near future.Behavioral synthesis can play a key role in this prospect, as stand-alone hardware CAD tool, or integrated in a global system design jlow strategy for HW/SW-codesign. Howevel; we experienced that efJicient use of behavioral synthesis tools for telecom non-DSP circuits requires functionality that goes beyond simply generating an RTGsynthesizable description. This functionality is discussed, together with a system level design methodology for efJicient use of behavioral synthesis tools,

Towards a holistic CAD platform for nanotechnologies

“…Then it maps this description on the configurable architecture of the nano-network. The transformation of the high-level description of the function of the basic modules and of their interconnections into an RTL description does not represent a new research challenge as this task is similar to that addressed by high-level synthesis tools, like those described in [17]- [19].…”

Comparing RTL and behavioral design methodologies in the case of a 2M-transistor ATM shaper

“…This paper includes no discussion of specific tools used for this experiment because the discussion of the specific characteristic of these tools is not relevant for the contribution of this paper. For more information about behavioral synthesis flows the reader is referred to [1], [2], and for other comparisons between RTL and behavioral synthesis see [3], [4], [5], [6].…”