A New Computing Model for C-Like Hardware Description Languages

Traditional C-like hardware description languages are based on single dimensional computing model. They describe only behavior of designs, while cost information is leaved to be digging out by a synthesizer at late stage of design process. However, cost information is needed in high level synthesis for making trade-off among different aspects of cost to achieve global optimized design. To solve the problem, we extended traditional computing model to multi-dimensional so cost information can be included in the language, and integrated it to a popular C++ variant hardware description language - SystemC. The result language describes both behavior and cost of designs so trade-off can be made at relative high level during synthesis process and early stage of design process, thus make it easy to optimize designs for different target applications