Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

VHDL signals and wait statements provide great expressive power for behavioral descriptions. However, due to their simulation semantics, most high-level synthesis tools do not handle these constructs and severely restrict their use, eliminating much of their power. In this report, we introduce a set of transformations to convert signals and wait statements to equivalent constructs that are easily handled by high-level synthesis tools. They greatly enlarge the synthesizable VHDL subset, thus increasing the usefulness and practicality of the language as an input to high-level synthesis. These transformations can also serve as a basis for converting a VHDL process to a form suitable for generation of software.