In the world of IC design, the RTL flow prevails. But today’s competitive market for state-of-the-art image processing, high-bandwidth communication, and computer vision and neural computing solutions demand another level of abstraction. RTL design and verification does not allow companies in these markets to be competitive as this flow takes too long to get to market. Successful companies in these markets are nimble, can target many potential implementation solutions, and can make last-minute specification changes while staying on schedule. The only way that they can achieve this success is by moving up to a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) flow using C++ and/or SystemC.