High-Level Synthesis: A Retrospective
High-level Synthesis or HLS represented an ambitious attempt by the community to provide capabilities for “algorithms to gates” for a period of almost three decades. The technical challenge in realizing this goal drew researchers from various areas ranging from parallel programming, digital signal processing, and logic synthesis to expert systems. This article takes a journey through the years of research in this domain with a narrative view of the lessons learnt and their implication for future research. As with any retrospective, it is written from a purely personal perspective of our research efforts in the domain, though we have made a reasonable attempt to document important technical developments in the history of high-level synthesis.