Design of complex image processing systems in ESL

This work presents the design of a complex image processing IP developed completely in C. We present the latest advanced in ESL-synthesis and demonstrate its main advantages over conventional RT-level flows. In particular we focus on the ability of behavioral synthesis to shorten the design cycle, perform functional verification and explore quickly the design space obtaining multiple dominating implementations with unique area vs. speed characteristics from an initial untimed behavioral description. A feature extraction process is presented in detailed showing how automatic design space exploration can lead to Pareto optimal (non-dominant) designs ranging from 524,648 gates to 584,868 gates and latencies of 38 to 69 state counts for the smallest and fastest design respectively taking approximately 6.3 hours.