This chapter serves as an introduction to the ESL flow, sampling topics covered in depth in subsequent chapters while providing background and motivation for those topics. The fundamental principle of ESL design is managing abstraction refinement and complexity while preserving design intent. Throughout the design flow, the design itself will be represented at various abstraction levels:

�Product market requirements
�Functional specification
�Architectural model
�Hardware and software design specifications
�Hardware and software functional and behavioral models
�RTL and software models
�Cell-level model and embedded production software
�Layout database

The product market requirements dictate the end-user functional and physical requirements of the product. The functional specification describes the functional requirements of the design from an opaque box perspective. The architectural model captures the HW/SW partitioning of the design. The hardware and software design specifications describe the implementation requirements of the design from a clear box view. The behavioral hardware and software models implement the algorithms required of the subsequent models without timing accuracy or, for functional models, no timing whatsoever. The RTL and software models are timing-accurate implementations of the behavioral hardware and software models. The cell-level model is machine-synthesized from the RTL, whereas the embedded production software is either machine-translated from the software model or, as is more generally the case today, handwritten. Finally, the layout database captures the structural geometry of all hardware elements.and their interconnect.that are to be fabricated on each layer of the multilayer integrated circuit. With this understanding of the design abstraction levels, what corresponding transformations of design intent occur?

Design intent originates in the human mind, collectively from marketing, system architects, and designers. As it flows through the design process it may be likened to information transmitted through a communication channel because design intent is information. According to Claude Shannon’s theorem, the rate at which information may be sent through a channel of a particular capacity with a particular probability of error is governed by the amount of error correction in its coding. However, unlike a communication channel that is supposed to preserve a transmitted message, the message that flows through a design channel is iteratively refined and augmented. Each refinement improves the fidelity of its representation—a model—until the final refinement is produced: layout database and production software.

5.1 Specifications and Modeling
5.2 Pre-Partitioning Analysis
5.3 Partitioning
5.4 Post-Partitioning Analysis and Debug
5.5 Post-Partitioning Verification
5.6 Hardware Implementation
5.7 Software Implementation
5.8 Use of ESL for Implementation Verification
5.9 Provocative Thoughts
5.10 Summary
5.11 The Prescription

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