Transformational Design Basics

Abstract

The second part of this book, Chapters 6 to 8, will present several transformational techniques to system synthesis. Typically, such techniques take a behavioral VHDL specification as input and map it first into a naive structural implementation. The implementation is then modified by iterative application of semantic-preserving transformations. These transformations do not change the level of abstraction, rather they explore the design space, looking for nearoptimal solutions. When the transformation procedure terminates and a satisfactory solution is found, the design will be mapped into a lower-level description and the synthesis process continues to refine the design into a final implementation.