Design of system interface modules

A design methodology and high-level synthesis techniques for integrating hardware modules into a system are presented. The interface between modules, which can obey arbitrary protocols, is generated from a high-level specification developed especially for describing intermodule communication. Central to the design methodology are libraries which contain system-level module generators and a strategy to capture the protocol and timing information necessary for interface synthesis. The main impact of this work is raising the interface design abstraction and reducing the effort required from a designer to produce a system using various IC technologies.<>