High Level Synthesis Has Come Of Age

The title grabbed my attention, but the typos and disorganized flow ended up leaving me disinterested and disappointed.

Gabe,
Thanks for the overview.
I worked at Silicon Compilers from 1986 through the Mentor acquisition. We never considered our tools High Level Synthesis rather it was an environment that had:
* Many configurable logic blocks (SRAM, Datapath, Muliplier, IO Pads, Random Logic, ALU, etc.)
* Place & Route
* Floor Planning
* IR Drop Analysis
* Package editor
* Cycle based simulation
* Transistor-level static timing analysis
* Logic Synthesis
* ATPG
* Schematic Capture
The Genesil product line was dropped by Mentor, although the GDT product line along with Lsim lived a bit longer at Mentor.

You should have mentioned that some tools are true synthesis tools, while some of these are really "parametric blocks"  e.g. the tools from Matlab and Synopsys Module compiler, Synplify DSP are not true synthesis engines.  There is behind the scenes structures which are modified via parameters.

Other tools e.g. Catapult, C2S, Forte, AutoESL, are true synthesis engines, where you can create arbitrary hardware from an input description + synthesis directives.

Also, you should have mentioned that Catapult is the dominant C Synthesis tool for many years in a row.  Mentor was an early maker of High level Synethsis tools, not late to the market (they just didn't have an RTL synthesis tool other than the ones aquired from Silicon Compilers)