From VHDL to efficient and first-timeright designs: A formal approach

In this article we provide a practical transformational approach to the synthesis of correct synchronous digital hardware designs from high-level specifications. We do this while taking into account the complete life cycle of a design from early prototype to full custom implementation. Besides time-to-market, both flexibility with respect to target architecture and efficiency issues are addressed by the methodology. The utilization of user-selected behaviorpreserving transformation steps ensures first-time-right designs while exploiting the experience, flexibility, and creativity of the designer. To ensure that design transformations are indeed behavior-preserving a novel mechanized approach to the specification and verification of design transformations on control data flow graphs which is independent of a specific behavioral model or graph size has been developed. As a demonstration of an industrial application we use a video processing algorithm needed for the conversion from a line-interlaced to progressively scanned video format. Both a video signal processor-based prototype implementation as well as a very efficient full custom implementation are developed starting from a single high-level behavioral specification of the algorithm in VHDL. Results are compared with those previously obtained using different tools and methodologies.