DOORS: An object-oriented CAD system for high level synthesis

Abstract

To expedite the design process of a complex system, it is required to view the system as interactions of complex subsystems which are not necessarily RTL components and synthesise the hardware from such a specification. In the paper, an automated design and synthesis environment called DOORS has been proposed that can accept a complex system specification at such a high level of abstraction and synthesises the circuit. DOORS is based on an object-oriented design methodology. Circuit elements are treated as classes. The designer describes the circuit behaviour as a sequence of state transitions in response to external messages. The method executed in response to a message is transparent to the external world. The specification may involve presynthesised components whose functionalities are invoked by sending messages to them. The synthesis system of DOORS accepts the specification and synthesises the circuit in terms of these components. The authors have mainly concentrated on the datapath synthesis mechanism of DOORS.