Conflict analysis in multiprocess synthesis for optimized system integration
CODES+ISSS '05 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
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This paper presents a new high-level synthesis methodology to generate optimized register-transfer level (RTL) implementations for multiprocess behavioral descriptions. The concurrent communicating processes specification paradigm is widely used in digital circuit and system design, and is employed in all popular hardware description languages. It has been shown that interprocess communication and synchronization can result in complex timing interdependencies, which significantly affect the performance of a multiprocess system. In this paper, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art high-level synthesis tools can generate significantly suboptimal implementations for behaviors that contain concurrent communicating processes. We present an analysis of how interprocess communication impacts high-level synthesis steps, and describe a new methodology to adapt existing high-level synthesis tools to optimize multiprocess descriptions. Our methodology is based on executing multiprocess performance analysis and process-by-process scheduling in an iterative manner. We present algorithms for key steps in the proposed methodology. We have performed extensive experiments in the context of a commercial high-level design flow to evaluate the proposed techniques. The results clearly demonstrate the utility of our techniques in synthesizing implementations with superior area, performance, and energy consumption. For example, up to 40% performance improvement (average of 35.6%) was achieved with little or no area overhead (average of 4.8%). In effect, the proposed techniques lead to a shift of the entire area-delay tradeoff curve for a design, to include superior designs that were hitherto infeasible. Our techniques also simultaneously result in up to 50% (average of 33.5%) improvement in energy and up to 69% (average of 58.3%) improvement in the energy-delay product.