An educational Electronic Design Automation tool for high level synthesis and optimization

Abstract

In this paper, we present an educational Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool to help undergraduate and graduate students better understand and implement fundamental concepts in digital electronic design and synthesis courses. The tool receives an intermediate format that represents the system behavior and a set of constraints as input; and generates the actual circuit in a net-list representation using the electronic components (functional units, memory and steering logic components) available in its library. A user is able to interact with the tool during the synthesis process and modify the intermediate representations before further execution. The effectiveness of the tool has been tested in a graduate level course.