SPARK: A Parallelizing Approach to the High-Level Synthesis of Digital Circuits

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. SPARK takes behavioral ANSI-C code as input, schedules it using speculative code motions and loop transformations, runs an interconnect-minimizing resource binding pass and generates a finite state machine for the scheduled design graph. Finally, a backend code generation pass outputs synthesizable register-transfer level (RTL) VHDL. This VHDL can then by synthesized using logic synthesis tools into an ASIC or can be mapped onto a FPGA.