Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++

Excerpt from article: “Konica Minolta Talks About High-Level Synthesis using C++“

In the early days of chip design circa 1970’s the engineers would write logic equations, then manually reduce that logic using Karnaugh Maps. Next, we had the first generation of logic synthesis in the early 1980’s, which read in a gate-level netlist, performed logic reduction, then output a smaller gate-level netlist. Logic synthesis then added the capability to move a gate-level netlist from one foundry to another. In the late 1980’s logic synthesis allowed RTL designers to write Verilog code and then produce a gate-level netlist. Ever since that time our industry has been searching for a design methodology even more productive than RTL coding, because a higher-level design entry above RTL entry could simulate quicker, have a higher capacity and even reach a larger audience of system-level users that don’t want to be encumbered with the low-level semantics of RTL coding.

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is an accepted design paradigm now, and the engineers at Konica Minolta have been using C++ as their design entry language for several years while designing multi-functional peripherals, professional digital printers, ultra-sound equipment for healthcare and other products.

The original C++ design flow used is shown below(in the full article) using the Catapult tool from Siemens EDA with benefits like 100X faster simulation times than RTL:

Read the entire article on SemiWiki originally published on July 11th, 2019.