High-Level Synthesis

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Goals: In this course we will study the hardware and software aspects of integrating heterogeneous components into a complete system; evaluating designs in a multi-objective optimization space; and designing new components that are reusable across different systems, product generations, and implementation platforms. Brief Description: Design and programming of System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms using high-level synthesis. Topics include: overview of technology and economic trends, methodologies and supporting CAD tools for system-level design and verification, software simulation and virtual platforms, FPGA prototyping, models of computation, the SystemC language, transaction-level modeling, hardware-software partitioning, memory organization, device drivers, on-chip communication architectures, power management and optimization, integration of programmable cores and specialized accelerators. Case studies of modern SoC platforms for various classes of applications.