Synthesis for control-flow-dominated machines

The combination of automatic and manual synthesis allows a quick and broad exploration of the design space in real time. The response time of Amical is very short, making it a genuine interactive system. Several large examples have already been used for Amical evaluation with excellent results, including a telephone answering machine controller, which is used as an illustrating example in this chapter. 

After the success and the widespread acceptance of logic and register-transfer-level (RTL) synthesis, the next step is micro-architecture synthesis, commonly called behavioral synthesis or high-level synthesis. This chapter presents an advanced, high-level synthesis system called Amical that is targeted toward 

As shown in figure 1, behavioral synthesis starts with two kinds of information a behavioral description and an external library of functional units (FUs). The external library of FUs may include standard execution units (adders, multipliers, ALUs, etc.) as well as more complex units defined by the designer. These may be large, complex blocks such as cache memories, I/O units, and so on. 

The rest of this chapter concentrates on the methodologies and the underlying concepts behind the development of Amical rather than the individual algorithms. Details about the algorithms used by Amical can be found in literature [13, 12, 14]. 

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