Progress in DSP design automation

Although digital signal processing is emerging as a major technological applications area, one has yet to witness the flourish of integrated-circuit design automation techniques which accompanied the recent boom in the computer industry. A potential catalyst to bring this about is the nascent field of high-level synthesis, which promises to furnish conventional datapath architectures with the power of parallelism and pipelining. This paper reports progress in a high-level IC design tool intended specifically for DSP users, now more than one year in development. While parallelism and pipelining are naturally exploited, novel use is made of synthesis techniques at bit-level, which brings both advantages and disadvantages in comparison to high-level synthesis. The approach is powerful and efficient in high-throughput, fixed-function applications.<>