Productivity issues in high-level design: are tools solving the real problems?

High-level design is an emerging methodology with a great potential for speeding up the design process. In order for the productivity increase to become a reality, a high level synthesis must be made more efficient as a synthesis tool as well as more integrated with other design tools. The present work has outlined the major problems with current high-level synthesis systems. In addition, the approaches for using high-level synthesis as a front-end optimizer for other design tools requiring structural networks as input are presented.