Taken for Granted

Today was DATE workshop day, and they ran 8 simultaneous workshops.  I attended and participated in the one on The Future of ESL Synthesis.  Here there was an interesting dichotomy on the definition of ESL Synthesis.  I, and others in industry, tended to take the position that ESL synthesis today is today’s high-level synthesis:  driven by code in C, C++ and/or SystemC, synthesise and explore various implementations of those functions in an automated way, down to gates (usually via RTL synthesis as an intermediary).   However, others in research tended to define it as future synthesis of complex HW-SW multicore platforms, and possibly also embodying tools to map or code-generate specific applications onto those complex platforms.   By the panel at the end, I think we had good consensus that this might well be the viable and likely future for ESL synthesis, embodying synthesis of SW tasks, HW blocks, ASIPs, and interfaces and communications (especially the last two); but some of us chose to focus on what is real today.   Lots of interesting discussion and a number of interesting presentations.

I took a slightly orthogonal view to ESL synthesis, talking about Application-specific Instruction set Processors (ASIPs) as a “third way” for designers and architects to consider, between the 2 extremes of fixed instruction set architecture (ISA) processors, and new dedicated hardware blocks.  Some interesting questions from the audience after the talk.

DATE 2009 has been another good technical event and the organisers pulled off a good event in what must have been difficult circumstances.