Basic concepts: control-path, data-path, storage.

Basic control-path concepts: State machines and Petri-nets

Basic data-path concepts: Split-protocol operators Memory subsystems: ordered and un-ordered. Elastic Pipelines. Deterministic Pipelines.

The Aa (Algorithm assembly) description language: an introduction. modules pipes storage simple examples Pipes and Storage. simple pipes, p2p pipes, signals storage: local to the module, global, ordering Compilation of an Aa program to hardware: the virtual circuit (VC) equivalent of an Aa program. Simple loops and pipeline inferences. dependencies guarded statements loop-controller for elastic pipeline deterministic pipelines Obtaining the maximum performance in a pipelined loop: timing analysis. single cycle initiation latency target. cycles which determine performance. prevention of combinational cycles. Going to VHDL: optimizations on the virtual circuit. Going to VHDL: the AHIR VHDL library.