A top-down interactive behavioral synthesis environment

Behavioral synthesis of digital circuits offers an effective way to deal with the increasing complexity of hardware design. Even though it has been the subject of considerable research efforts over the last twenty years, practical implementations have not been widely accepted by industry yet. This happens due to the fact that designers demand interaction, which allows them to submit different constraints (especially with respect to interface specifications) and obtain optimal results while exploring all applicable implementation conditions. This paper presents a new, GUI enhanced and grammar based, interactive synthesis environment. The underlying methodology allows designers to supplement behavioral synthesis optimizations with constraints among the operators in the textual algorithmic description, to meet their implementation preferences. Consequently, it raises the feasibility for high-level design space exploration by supporting better user control of automated synthesis results