Synthesis of embedded systemC design: a case study of digital neural networks

Abstract

This work presents the whole system-on-silicon design flow using systemC system specification language. In this study, systemC is used to design a multilayer perceptron neural network, which is applied to an electrocardiogram pattern recognition system. The objective of this work is to exemplify the synthesis of RTL-and behavioral integrated systems. To achieve this, a preprocessing methodology was used to optimize the three main constraints of hardware neural network (HNN) design: accuracy, space and processing speed. This allows a complex HNN to be implemented on a single field programmable gate array (FPGA). The high level systemC synthesis allows the straightforward translation of system level into hardware level, avoiding the error prone and the time consuming translation into another hardware description language.