This course is an elementary introduction to high-level synthesis (HLS) design flow. The goals of the course are describing, debugging and implementing combinational logic circuits on FPGAs using only C/C++ language without any help from HDLs (e.g., VHDL or Verilog). The HLS is recently used by several industry leaders (such as Nvidia and Google) to design their hardware and software platforms. The HLS design flow is the future of hardware design, which quickly becomes a must-have skill for every hardware or software engineer who is keen on utilising FPGAs for their exceptional performance and low power consumption.

It uses the Xilinx HLS software and hardware platforms to demonstrate real examples and applications. This course is the first to build the HLS design flow and skills along with the digital logic circuit concepts from scratch. Throughout the course, you will follow several examples describing HLS concepts and techniques. The course contains numerous quizzes and exercises for you to practice and master the proposed methods and approaches.

This course is the first of a series of courses on HLS in designing hardware modules and accelerating algorithms on a target FPGA. Whereas this course focuses on combinational circuits. The other courses in the series will explain how to use HLS in designing sequential logic circuits, algorithm acceleration, and hybrid CPU+ FPGA heterogeneous systems.