Efficient integration of behavioral synthesis within existing design flows

Analyzes the reasons why behavioral synthesis was never widely accepted by designers, and then proposes a practical solution to this problem. The main breakthrough of this new approach is the redefinition of the synthesis flow at the behavioral level to better profit from the powerful of RTL (register transfer level) and FSM (finite state machine) synthesis tools. The effectiveness of this new methodology is illustrated with two large design examples: a two-million-transistor ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) shaper design and a motion estimator for a video codec (H261 standard)