Panel Discussion High Level Design and ESL: Who Cares? Masahiro Fujita VLSI Design and Education Center (VDEC) University of Tokyo

Questions from the organizer (1) With HL design models verification becomes easier or harder ? –HL models could be golden for RTL verification This is, I believe, why industrial people are writing HL models –There are RTL specific properties to be verified, such as clock crossing issues

Questions from the organizer (2) Starting with HL is good in general ? –Good for more application specific ones, such as SoC –Good for the designs where high level synthesis tools work pretty well, such as DSP type computation This is, I believe, why industrial people are writing HL models –May not be good for microprocessor designs where performance are critical, and designs themselves are very similar to one another How about BlueSpec ? It may be useful

Questions from the organizer (3) Rationale to start with HL (cost effective ?) –Industrial designers (architects) like to have golden model in the beginning to make sure the overall behaviors Then, how can we use it ? –Also they like to explore more design space with HL models Need reasonably good high/system-level synthesis tools –For HW/SW co-design, yes Discuss in the next slides Equivalence checking may not be so powerful –For speed up of scientific computing, must be Discuss in the following

Algorithmic design description High level synthesizable description Register Transfer Level description Many steps of manual refinement Many steps of manual refinement Design optimization High level synthesis Design optimization Static/ Model checking Sequential Equivalence Checking High level design flow and verification (Ideal case for HW/SW co-design) Tools have been actually developed under Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) –JAXA, Toshiba, NEC, Fujitsu, UCI (Prof. Gajski) and U. of Tokyo Really used for space satellite designs in Japan

My conclusions If you can have correct RTL by itself, you do not need HL models –Designing something very similar to previous ones If you need to develop something very new, starting with RTL designs is very difficutl –Need to explore design space in architectural designs, which need HL models anyway –Need to establish functionally correct HL models as golden for RTL designs If you are working under HW/SW co-designs, anyway we have HL models –Need good and consistent supports in system-level