High-Level Synthesis

In this book, the term synthesis is used to denote the process of transforming a digital system from a behavioral specification into an implementation structure. Generally speaking, the specification includes some form of abstractions, i.e., some of the design decisions are not bound. The implementation, on the other hand, has to describe in detail the complete design at a given level of abstraction. Thus, synthesis can be seen as a process of creating implementation details which are left out of the specification [Pen87]. For example, a purely behavioral specification of a microprocessor may specify only what should be done in a typical instruction cycle and leaves it to the synthesis procedure to decide whether a centralized bus should be used, which technique should be employed to implement the control function, and how much parallelism should be supported.