MICROELECTRONIC SYSTEMS NEWS



FILENUMBER: 4013
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
vhdl synopsys amical 
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: october 1993
TITLE: VHDL Architectural Synthesis Software

VHDL Architectural Synthesis Software

(Contributed by A. A. Jerraya of TIMA)

AMICAL is an Interactive Architectural Synthesis  Tool  based  on
VHDL  developed  at  the system level synthesis group of TIMA La-
boratory at INPG, Grenoble, France.  AMICAL starts with  a  func-
tional specification given in VHDL, it performs scheduling, allo-
cation and generates an architecture composed of a data-path  and
a controller that may feed existing synthesis tools acting at the
logic and register transfer levels. It uses a powerful  scheduler
and  accepts  a  quite  large VHDL subset (multiple waits, nested
loops, exits, procedures,  functions...).   The  present  version
produces a VHDL description that can be accepted by Synopsys.

The main strengths of the system are:

    - Interactive synthesis:

  AMICAL allows the mixing of manual and automatic synthesis.
  You can start  a  design  manually and ask AMICAL to finish
  it for you or  you  can  interactively modify the results
  of automatic synthesis. All manual interactions are verified.
  Only correct decisions are accepted.

    - Re-use of existing components:
  AMICAL uses an external library of Functional Units that
  includes operators defined  by  the  user.  Each Functional
  unit may execute several multi-cycle operations. These
  operations are linked to the operations  and  procedure
  call  used  in  the  behavioral description. The functional
  unit concept allows the use of complex compenents  (Memory,
  I/O Units, Cache, etc.) within high level synthesis.

AMICAL is organized as an interactive  environment,  it  provides
several facilities for architecture analysis (statistics, evalua-
tion, links between the VHDL behaviour and the  resulting  archi-
tecture).  The response time of AMICAL is short enough to make it
an interactive system.

The combination of automatic and manual synthesis allows a  quick
and  broad  exploration of the design space in real time. Several
large examples have already been used for AMCIAL evaluation  with
excellent  results.  These  include a telephone answering machine
controller, a PID and the MPEG-AUDIO system.

AMICAL is available free of Charge.  The present version has  al-
ready  been  distributed  to  several  experimental centers.  The
present version runs on SPARC station under SUNOS.  Two  versions
of the graphical interface exists: Openwindow, Suntools.

The distribution includes:

    - The AMICAL software.
    - A Tutorial
    - A user's Manual
    - A beginner Session
    - Synthesis exercises (6 Hours)

The distribution does not include the VHDL analyser.  The present
version  makes  use  of the VHDL Analyser of CLSI.  A new version
based on LVS, the VHDL compiler  from  LEDA,  will  be  available
soon.

For more information, contact:

   Dr. Ahmed Amin JERRAYA
   TIMA Laboratory
   46, Avenue Felix Viallet
   Grenoble, FRANCE
   TEL: +33-76-57-46-17
   FAX: +33-76-47-38-14
   jerraya@verdon.imag.fr
   secr@archi.imag.fr

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