Architectural Models in Synthesis

During the refinement of a given specification into a structural design of standard components, a designer first selects a design style and then defines a target architecture. We use the term design style to refer to the principal qualitative features of a design, such as prioritized interrupt, instruction buffer, snooping data cache, bus-oriented datapath, serial I/O, direct memory access, and others. A target architecture defines a design more precisely in terms of particular units, their parameters, and the connections among units. For example, a processor architecture would include the number of registers in the register file, the number of buses in the datapath, the number of pipeline stages, the number of status bits, the number of ways branching can occur, and so on.