7 Steps to Higher Productivity

In a recently published white paper, authors Bruno Thery, Serge Mazer, Adrian Beames and Yvan Desmartin of STMicroelectronics describe their seven steps approach to achieve higher productivity using High-Level Synthesis (HLS) and how this was key to help them deliver working silicon in time for the Las Vegas CES in January 2010.

The white paper provides a detailed, step by step, description of how they start from a high-level specifications and reach production quality RTL using HLS. One of the big merits of this paper is to remind that an HLS flow isn’t about “automagically” producing RTL from random C++ or SystemC code. The authors point that important partitioning decisions (Step n.2) must be made by the engineering team, or that – just like with RTL design – proper coding produces the best results (Step n.4).

STMicroelectronics’ Home Entertainment and Displays Group (HED) designs the video decoders and display subsystems for chips going into set-top boxes – a highly competitive industry. With the proper methodology and the right expectations about what HLS can do, they “reduced the time to provide the RTL by more than two times, compared to RTL done by hand” and most importantly, Yvan Desmartin’s team was able to meet their critical CES deadline.

The full paper can be read here.

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