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MetaRTL: raising the abstraction level of RTL design

The register transfer abstraction (RTL) has been established as the industrial standard for ASIC design, soft IP exchange and the backend interface for chip design at higher level. Unfortunately, the "synthesizable" VHDL/Verilog incarnation of the RTL abstraction has problems which prevent it from more productive use. For example, the confusion as the result of using simulation semantics for synthesis purpose, the lack of facility for component reuse at the "protocol" level, and the lack of memory abstraction. After a detailed discussion of these problems, this paper proposes a new RTL abstraction, called MetaRTL, which can be implemented by a modest extension to the traditional imperative programming languages. The productivity gain is further demonstrated by the description of a synthesis tool, called MetaSyn, which provides the "added-value". Experiments on the benchmark set show that MetaRTL is far more concise than the "synthesizable" HDL specification and incurs no overhead for synthesis result.