RTL Synthesis: From Logic Synthesis to Automatic Pipelining

Design automation has been one of the main propellers of the semiconductor industry with logic synthesis being one of the core technologies in this field. This article reviews the evolution of logic synthesis until the advent of techniques for automatic pipelining based on elastic timing, either synchronous or asynchronous. The emergence of these techniques can enable a productive interaction with tools that can do microarchitectural exploration of complex designs.