Syntactic Representation Transformation in Operator Design Method Based on ANTLR Tool

With the development of manufacturing technology and increasing complexity of functionality, traditional IC design method has become difficult to meet the demands of limited time-to-market and researchers´ interests have been concentrated on novel design methods such as high-level synthesis, in which operator design method is one of the most promising solutions. In this paper, ANTLR tool is applied to conduct the transformation from C language to high-level operator language, which is a key step in the operator design method. The transformation procedure is comprised of four parts, namely lexical analysis, syntax analysis, AST analysis, and template emission. With a variety of experiments of different grammatical features and sentence structures of C language, the proposed syntactic representation transformation has been proven comprehensive and successful based on the proper application of ANTLR tool. Furthermore, the proposed scheme provides a good guideline for the subsequent working flow of operator design method.