The ever increasing need to deliver electronic products quickly to the marketplace, has fuelled the development of a wide range of design automation tools which aim to increase productivity at different stages of the design cycle. Through the application of structured design methods, shorter time-to-market on increasingly complex systems has been made possible. The ability to produce electronic systems from high-level descriptions, a technique known as <i>high-level synthesis</i>, is currently an active area of research and represents the latest development in design automation. The driving force behind this, is the quest for shorter design times and the ability to handle systems of greater complexity than is possible with present tools. This thesis reports on work carried out on the design and developoment of SAGE, a novel high-level synthesis tool which generates netlist level solutions from high-level behavioural descriptions. SAGE is unique in the flexibility it allows in the choice of architecture. This is achieved through the inclusion of the designer throughout the design process Significant features of the work reported include: - An advanced time model for the description of clocked and combinatorial component behaviour. In addition the concept of indeterminate temporal behaviour is supported. - Scheduling and allocation within a hierarchical environment along with support for using components over several levels in the design hierarchy. - A flexible design cycle incorporating support for user interaction and cycle time (clock period) management throughout the synthesis process. - A novel optimisation algorithm for use in pipeline synthesis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:657255 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Mallon, David J. |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/15260 |
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