High-level synthesis: an essential ingredient for designing complex ASICs

It is common wisdom that synthesizing hardware from higher-level descriptions than Verilog incurs a performance penalty. The case study here shows that this need not be the case. If the higher-level language has suitable semantics, it is possible to synthesize hardware that is competitive with hand-written Verilog RTL. Differences in the hardware quality are dominated by architecture differences and, therefore, it is more important to explore multiple hardware architectures. This exploration is not practical without quality synthesis from higher-level languages.