Synthesizing hardware from sketches

This paper proposes to adapt sketching, a software synthesis technique, to hardware development. In sketching, the designer develops an incomplete hardware description, providing the "insight" into the design. The synthesizer completes the design to match an executable specification. This style of synthesis liberates the designer from tedious and error-prone details-such as timing delays, wiring in combinational circuits and initialization of lookup tables-while allowing him to control low-level aspects of the design. The main benefit will be a reduction of the time-to-market without impairing system performance.