A novel approach to the synthesis of practical datapath architectures using artificial intelligence techniques

The authors describe the development of a multiexpert, architectural design tool for use in high-level VLSI system design. The tool, HAGGLER II, functions at the architectural level with specific application in the area of datapath design. The system reads a high-level behavioral description in C and synthesizes an appropriate architecture along with the customized microcode for the design. HAGGLER II adopts an iterative approach to the problem: a control synthesizer is used to evaluate the effectiveness of an implementation and thus operators and registers are grouped more effectively than can be done by direct dataflow-graph mapping