AMICAL: An interactive high level synthesis environment

The AMICAL architectural synthesis system starts with a behavioral specification given in VHDL, performs both scheduling and allocation, and generates a structural description that may feed existing silicon compilers acting at the logic and RT levels. All the synthesis algorithms are implemented as part of an interactive synthesis environment, where automatic and manual design may be mixed. Experiments have shown that the use of AMICAL leads to the best known solutions for most benchmarks. These solutions may be obtained by mixing automatic and manual design or by the use of an automatic exploration of the design space. The response time of AMICAL is reasonably short making it a genuine interactive system