An Automatic Approach to Generate Haste Code from Simulink Specifications

One of the reasons that prevents digital designers to adopt asynchronous design methodologies is the lack of high level design tools that are available for asynchronous design. Nowadays, it is quite common to use Simulink, from The Mathworks, as a modeling tool and then to synthesize the developed diagram into RTL code automatically. In the synchronous domain some tools are able to synthesize such models. Until now however, such tools were not available in the asynchronous domain. Our work aims at filling this gap using the Haste language and TiDE tools from Handshake Solutions to facilitate mapping Simulink models onto selftimed circuits. The solution proposed is based on the CodeSimulink environment, a co-design tool, able to synthesize systems composed of hardware and software parts from Simulink descriptions. A model of a commercial audio CODEC has been converted using this approach, showing a significant reduction in development time.