SPARK

Release Date: September 19, 2003Web Site: https://www.cecs.uci.edu/~spark/

SPARK is a C-to-VHDL high-level synthesis framework that employs a set of innovative compiler, parallelizing compiler, and synthesis transformations to improve the quality of high-level synthesis results. The compiler transformations have been re-instrumented for synthesis by incorporating ideas of mutual exclusivity of operations, resource sharing and hardware cost models. The SPARK methodology is particularly targeted to control-intensive microprocessor functional blocks and multimedia and image processing applications. We have validated the effectiveness of our approach and evaluated the various optimizations for large real-life applications such as the Instruction Length Decoder from the Intel Pentium and multimedia applications such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and the GIMP image processing tool.

Reference:
R. Goering, “Tool promises parallelizing synthesis,” EE Times, December 19, 2003
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