Guest Editor’s Introduction Putting Synthesis

is concerned with algorithm design and mapping the algorithm onto hardware. High-level synthesis, which until now was used only in industrial laboratories and universities, is evolving from its embryonic state to practical use in product design. Commercial products now address logic-level synthesis, which is rapidly gaining user acceptance. Logic synthesis systems manipulate a Boolean-level or equivalent representation of the design. The role of synthesis at this level is to minimize the logic and optimize the design in terms of area and performance. Our issue reports on work done at two industrial laboratories and at a European university. A number of universities in the US have been very active in high-level synthesis research, which has provided the enabling technology for current synthesis developments. The systems described in this special issue have been used or will be used soon in design projects. System specification is currently done using programming languages. It is hard, if not impossible, to describe hardware requirements with this type of language. The difficulty lies in describing