When it comes to frameworks, the familiar story of the elephant and the six blind philosophers seems to apply. As each philoso­ pher encountered a separate part of the elephant, each pronounced his considered, but flawed judgement. One blind philosopher felt a leg and thought it a tree.

After long years of work that have seen little industrial application, high-level synthesis is finally on the verge of becoming a practical tool. The state of high-level synthesis today is similar to the state of logic synthesis ten years ago. At present, logic-synthesis tools are widely used in digital system design. In the future, high-level synthesis will play a key role in mastering design complexity and in truly exploiting the potential of ASIes and PLDs, which demand extremely short design cycles. Work on high-level synthesis began over twenty years ago. Since substantial progress has been made in understanding the basic then, problems involved, although no single universally-accepted theoretical framework has yet emerged. There is a growing number of publications devoted to high-level synthesis, specialized workshops are held regularly, and tutorials on the topic are commonly held at major conferences. This book gives an extensive survey of the research and development in high-level synthesis. In Part I, a short tutorial explains the basic concepts used in high-level synthesis, and follows an example design throughout the synthesis process. In Part II, current high-level synthesis systems are surveyed.