AutoPilot: A Platform-Based ESL Synthesis System

Abstract

The rapid increase of complexity in System-on-a-Chip design urges the design community to raise the level of abstraction beyond RTL. Automated behavior-level and system-level synthesis are naturally identified as next steps to replace RTL synthesis and will greatly boost the adoption of electronic system-level (ESL) design. High-level executable specifications, such as C, C++, or SystemC, are also preferred for system-level verification and hardware/software co-design.

In this chapter we present a commercial platform-based ESL synthesis system, named AutoPilot™ offered by AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. AutoPilot is based on the xPilot system originally developed at UCLA. It automatically generates efficient RTL code from C, C++ or SystemC descriptions for a given system platform and simultaneously optimize logic, interconnects, performance, and power. Preliminary experiments demonstrate very promising results for a wide range of applications, including hardware synthesis, system-level design exploration, and reconfigurable accelerated computing.