In the paper "Design of a H.264 encoder in five months using application engine synthesis" (PDF available here), Synfora engineers explain how they have been able to quickly develop a hardware H.264/AVC encoder running in real-time at D1 resolution, using their PICO tool.
Synfora's PICO, like Mentor's Catapult C, is a High-Level Synthesis tool that accepts as input software models written in high-level, untimed languages (such as ANSI C) and produce as output optimized, synthesizable RTL.
