STMicroelectronics: HLS meets digital signal processing: Insights from case studies from automotive and physiology

Increasing digital hardware complexity requires faster development without sacrificing quality. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) accelerates design by converting high-level algorithms into optimized RTL. This work presents the use of Siemens EDA Catapult HLS for DSP design in Automotive and Biomedical applications through three case studies: a multiplexed DSP for airbag arming, an Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) unit for battery health monitoring, and a DSP architecture using LMS filtering and correlation to recover motion-corrupted PPG signals. In all cases, HLS enables rapid exploration of area–latency–throughput trade-offs starting from software models, achieving performance and area comparable to manual RTL while improving design flexibility and reuse across domains.