HLS with Grammar-Based Hardware Synthesis: A Case Study

High Level Synthesis has made it possible to describe designs at behavioural level in lan- guages like VHDL and to synthesize detailed circuits automatically. Recently , new ways of describing and synthesizing control-dominated communicating hardware and protocols has sailed up to challenge HLS as the method for the future: hardware synthesis from grammar- based specifications. Grammar-based specifications allows the designer to specify the behaviour of contr ol- dominated designs at a high-level in terms of sequences of incoming symbols that together forms a valid input sentence. When a meaningful sequence has been detected the associated action is performed. In this case study, we compare the results obtained using an in-house hardware compiler for a grammar-based specification language called Pr oGram with the results obtained using three other modern methods: 1) the in-house CMIST appr oach to HLS, 2) Conventional HLS and 3) Direct synthesis of Behavioural RTL VHDL.