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1The increasing complexity of hardware designs makes functional verification a challenge. The key issue of the state-of-the-art verification approaches is to obtain a "good" model for automated test generation or formal property checking. In this paper, we describe techniques for deriving EFSM-based models from HDL descriptions and briefly discuss applications of such models for verification. The distinctive feature of the suggested approach is that it automatically determines what registers of a design encode its state and use this information for model reconstruction.

Application-specific systems with FPGA accelerators are often designed using high-level synthesis or hardware construction tools. Nowadays, there are many frameworks available, both open-source and commercial. In this work, we attempt to fairly compare several existing solutions (languages and tools), including Verilog (our baseline), Chisel, Bluespec SystemVerilog (Bluespec Compiler), DSLX (XLS), MaxJ (MaxCompiler), and C (Bambu and Vivado HLS). Our analysis has been carried out using a representative example of 8×8 inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), a widely used algorithm engaged in, among others, JPEG and MPEG decoders. The metrics under consideration include: (a) the degree of automation (how much less code is required compared to Verilog), (b) the controllability (possibility to achieve given design characteristics, namely a given ratio of the performance and area), and (c) the flexibility (ease of design modification to achieve certain characteristics). Rather than focusing on computational kernels only, we have developed AXI-Stream wrappers for the synthesized implementations, which allows adequately evaluating characteristics of the designs when they are used as parts of real computer systems. Our study shows clear examples of what impact specific optimizations (tool settings and source code modifications) have on the overall system performance and area. It emphasizes how important is to be able to control the balance between the communication interface utilization and the computational kernel performance and delivers clear guidelines for the next generation tools for designing FPGA accelerator based systems.

Application-specific systems with FPGA accelerators are often designed using high-level synthesis or hardware construction tools. Nowadays, there are many frameworks available, both open-source and commercial. In this work, we aim at a fair comparison of several languages (and tools), including Verilog (our baseline), Chisel, Bluespec SystemVerilog (Bluespec Compiler), DSLX (XLS), MaxJ (MaxCompiler), and C (Bambu and Vivado HLS). Our analysis has been carried out using a representative example of 8×8 inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), a widely used algorithm engaged in JPEG and MPEG decoders. The metrics under consideration include: (a) the degree of automation (how much less code is required compared to Verilog), (b) the controllability (possibility to achieve given design characteristics, namely a given ratio of the performance and area), and (c) the flexibility (ease of design modifications to achieve certain characteristics). Rather than focusing on computational kernels only, we use AXI-Stream wrappers for the synthesized implementations, which allows adequately evaluating characteristics of the designs when they are used as parts of real systems. Our study shows clear examples of what impact specific optimizations (tool settings and source code modifications) have on the overall system performance and area. It emphasizes how important is to be able to control the balance between the communication interface utilization and the computational kernel performance and delivers clear guidelines for the next generation tools for designing FPGA-accelerator-based systems.