An Interactive Design Environment for C-based High-level Synthesis of RTL Processors

Abstract Much eort in RTL design has been devoted to developing \push-button" types of tools. However, given the highly complex nature, and lack of control on RTL design, push-button types of synthesis is not accepted by most designers. Interactive design space exploration with assistance of tools and algorithms can be more eective because it provides control of all steps of synthesis. In this paper, we propose an interactive RTL design environment, which enables designers to control design steps. In our interactive envi-ronment, the user can control the design process at every stage, observe the eects of design decisions, and manually override synthesis decisions at will. Finally, we present a set of experimental results that demon-strate the benets of our approach. Our combination of automated tools and interactive control by the designer results in quickly gener-ated RTL designs with better performance than fully-automatic results, comparable to fully manually optimized designs. 1