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Hindawi VLSI Design
Special issue on High-level synthesis: Methodologies and Practice
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Call for Papers
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Current VLSI technology allows the design of sophisticated digital systems with ever-growing demands in performance and power/energy consumption. Rapidly changing user demands, unprecedented applications, evolved existing, or newly introduced standards, continuously shape the computational landscape.

It has long been observed that human designers' productivity does not escalate sufficiently to match the corresponding increase in chip complexity. This technology-productivity gap is probably the most important problem in the industrial development of innovative products. A dramatic increase in designer productivity is only possible through the adoption and practicing of methodologies that raise the specification abstraction level, ingeniously hiding low-level, time-consuming, error-prone details. New EDA (Electronic Design Automation) methodologies aim to generate high-performance digital designs from high-level descriptions, a process called High-Level Synthesis (HLS). The input to this process is usually an algorithmic-level description, generating synthesizable register-transfer level designs that can be implemented on FPGAs or ASICs

We invite authors from both the academic and industrial communities to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that present new high-level synthesis methodologies and techniques or showcase interesting aspects of their practice. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

- Very high-level specifications and associated models of computation
- Challenges in high-level synthesis for heterogeneous manycore custom computation on FPGA-based platforms
- Imperative-, functional-, and concurrency-oriented domain-specific languages for hardware compilation
- Transparent optimization through code refactoring and source-to-source transformations
- Intermediate representations for multistage transformation and optimization
- Link-time and interprocedural optimizations for improving whole program hardware compilation
- Automatic compiler retargeting for efficient hardware generation
- New approaches for compiling dynamic languages to hardware
- Architecture description languages (ADLs) for automated hardware architecture and toolchain generation
- Early assessment, design-space exploration, and analysis tools in the HLS environment
- Applying HLS for application-specific programmable processor generation

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal’s Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/vlsi/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/vlsi/hsmp/ according to the following timetable:

Important Dates
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Manuscript Due: Friday, 2 August 2013
First Round of Reviews: Friday, 25 October 2013
Publication Date: Friday, 20 December 2013

Lead Guest Editor
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Konstantinos Masselos, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Peloponnese, Tripolis 22100, Greece

Guest Editors
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Steven Derrien, University of Rennes 1, INRIA Research Institute, Rennes, France
Nikolaos Kavvadias, Ajax Compilers, Athens, Greece
Hiren D. Patel, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1

Direct link
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http://www.hindawi.com/journals/vlsi/si/320389/cfp/