The Challenges of Hardware Synthesis from C-like Languages

The relentless increase in the complexity of integrated circuits we can fabricate imposes a continuing need for ways to describe complex hardware succinctly. Because of their ubiquity and flexibility, many have proposed to use the C and C++ languages as specification languages for digital hardware. Yet, tools based on this idea have seen little commercial interest. In this paper, I argue that C/C++ is a poor choice for specifying hardware for synthesis and suggest a set of criteria that the next successful hardware description language should have