High-level synthesis of control and memory intensive communication systems

Communication sub-systems that deal with switching, routing and protocol implementation often have their functionality dominated by control logic and interaction with memory. Synthesis of such Control and Memory Intensive Systems (hereafter abbreviated to CMISTs) poses demands that in the past have not been met satisfactorily by general purpose high-level synthesis (HLS) tools and have led to several research efforts to address these demands. In this paper we: characterise CMISTs from the synthesis viewpoint; present a synthesis methodology adapted for CMISTs; present the Operation and Maintenance (OAM) Protocol of the ATM, its modelling in VHDL and synthesis aspects of the VHDL model; present the results of applying the synthesis methodology to the OAM as a test case-the results are compared to that obtained using the not adapted general purpose High-level synthesis tool; prove the efficacy of the proposed synthesis methodology by applying it to an industrial design and comparing our results to the results from two commercial HLS tools and to the results obtained by designing manually at register-transfer level.