Electronic structures are getting smaller and smaller. Therefore more and more complex systems are integrated on one IC. To design and test such a system in a short time you need to look at the system at a hight abstraction level. That means that algorithms and not the implementation (RTL) are described. The great challenge of ESL is the synthesis of (parallel) hardware architectures out of a description of an algorithm in a special language (e.g. Matlab, SystemC).