2004 Reports

Sequential Challenges in Synthesizing Esterel

Soviani, Cristian; Zeng, Jia; Edwards, Stephen A.

State assignment is a formidable task. As designs written in a hardware description language such as Esterel inherently carry more high level information that a register transfer level model, such information can be used to guide the encoding process. A question arises if the high level information alone is strong enough to suggest an efficient state assignment, allowing low-level details to be ignored. This report suggests that with Esterel's flexibility, most optimization potential is not within the high-level structure. It appears effective state assignment cannot rely solely on high level information.