Before synthesis, chip designers used to implement all aspects of chip design by hand. This included combinational logic implementation, storage elements such as SRAMs, flip-flops and latches. Netlist as well as place-and-route were also done fairly manually. High-level design implementations, either in C, Verilog or another high-level language, were manually translated into gates.

When synthesis arrived, chip design moved up to a higher level of abstraction, implementing designs in HDL (VHDL or Verilog), with synthesis translating HDL into logic gates and storage elements, even inferring SRAM storage. This eliminated much manual labor of chip design. Synthesis also optimized paths well and enabled engineers to work on much larger designs, which are still growing at Moore’s self-fulfilling-prophecy pace.

However, even today synthesis limits the style of designs that engineers are able to create. Synthesis performs well for certain kinds of design styles, while not supporting others. While HDL is capable of describing all kinds of designs, logic and storage structures, only a subset of these is synthesizable. Designers must be cautious about what they feed into synthesis tools, to ensure functionally correct results. Otherwise, many kinds of problems can result, which are not only incorrect, but can also appear to work correctly, but instead be intermittently incorrect at random intervals.

Design Style Synthesis Supports

The main design style which today’s mainstream synthesis products by companies such as Synopsys, Cadence, and various FPGA vendors support is synchronous single-phase of clock flip-flop style. This singular style is the simplest for synthesis to handle and is the most productive. When designing a component which uses a single clock with inputs and outputs synchronous to the same clock, a designer can move at maximum speed of productivity with minimal concern besides correct functionality.

This design style contains asynchronous logic only between flip-flops. Reset is handled carefully per FPGA-vendor of ASIC library vendor recommendations of being synchronous or asynchronous. Synthesis handles this design style well, providing additional capabilities such as automatic pipelining of logic across flip-flop stages.

This is the main design style synthesis supports and designer can feel comfortable using. As long as all inputs and outputs are inside the chip and all logic runs on a single clock, things are as simple as it gets. Everything else adds complexity and caution.

Caution Required

Any deviation from that singular synchronous design style, slows design effort down because caution must be observed with more care, patience and expertise applied. The following cases require additional caution:

• dual-phase design – i.e. using both edges of the clock within the design
• inputs and outputs external to the chip
• multiple clock domains, where parts of the design run at one clock frequency while other parts run on one or more different clock frequencies
• synchronization logic between clock domains
• multiplexing multiple input clocks down to a single output clock
• asynchronous logic which may be sensitive to output glitches
• clock signal that goes through logic
• matching delays
• sampling of external input data

In other words, anything else besides synchronous logic with all signals inside the chip requires caution. Each of the above cases, and there are more, requires caution, pause and re-examination of whether it is the only way to do it. If it is, then isolation of this portion of the design is needed with a cautious approach, with a realization that synthesis may produce an erroneous result.

For instance, external inputs may have setup and hold relative to the input clock. However, a delay from the clock input to the internal clock tree can break hold times. Or, multiplexing multiple input clocks down to a single clock can cause glitches on the output clock under certain conditions. These issues are most likely not visible during HDL simulations, and may not even be visible during gate-level simulations, as the results may vary from build-to-build.

Not Supported

The following design styles are not supported by the mainstream synthesis:

• Dynamic logic
• Latch-based designs
• Wave pipelining
• Asynchronous logic (clockless)