HERCULES-a system for high-level synthesis

An approach is presented to high-level synthesis of VLSI processors and systems. Synthesis consists of two phases: behavioral synthesis, which involves implementation-independent representations: and structural synthesis which relates to the transformation of a behavior into an implementation. The authors describe the HERCULES system and address the hardware description problem, behavioral synthesis, optimization using a method called the reference stack and the mapping of behavior onto a structure. They present a model for control based on sequencing graphs that supports multiple threads of execution flow, allowing varying degrees of parallelism in the resulting hardware. Results are presented for three examples: the MC 6502, Intel 8251, and FRISC, a 16-bit microprocessor.<<ETX>>

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