A Design Methodology for Compositional High-Level Synthesis of Communication-Centric SoCs

Intellectual property (IP) core based design is an emerging design methodology to deal with increasing chip design complexity. C/C++ based high level synthesis (HLS) is also gaining traction as a design methodology to deal with increasing design complexity. In the work presented here, we present a design methodology that combines these two individual methodologies and is therefore more powerful. We discuss our proposed methodology in the context of supporting efficient hardware synthesis of a class of mathematical functions without altering original C/C++ source code. Additionally, we also discuss and propose methods to integrate legacy IP cores in existing HLS flows. Relying on concepts from the domains of program recognition and optimized low level implementations of such arithmetic functions, the described design methodology is a step towards intelligent synthesis where application characteristics are matched with specific architectural resources and relevant IP cores in a transparent manner for improved area-delay results. The combined methodology is more aware of the target hardware architecture than the conventional HLS flow. Implementation results of certain compute kernels from a commercial tool Vivado-HLS as well as proposed flow are also compared to show that proposed flow gives better results.

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A Design Methodology For The High-level Synthesis Of Fault-tolerant Asics

Workshop on VLSI Signal Processing ◽

10.1109/vlsisp.1992.641073 ◽

2005 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

A. Orailoglu ◽

R. Karri

Keyword(s):

Design Methodology ◽

Fault Tolerant ◽

High Level Synthesis ◽

High Level

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Layout Modeling and Design Space Exploration in Pss1 System

VLSI Design ◽

10.1155/1997/42849 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 211-221

Author(s):

Fur-Shing Tsai ◽

Yu-Chin Hsu

Keyword(s):

Design Methodology ◽

Design Space Exploration ◽

Design Space ◽

Space Exploration ◽

High Level Synthesis ◽

Design Parameters ◽

Information Feedback ◽

Synthesis System ◽

Hardware Costs ◽

High Level

This paper presents the design methodology used in PSS1, a high level synthesis system designed for computation dominated applications. It includes a behavior synthesizer and an area optimizer. Based on a pre-defined architecture, the behavior synthesizer translates a description into a number of designs with different delays and hardware costs. Based on a two-level layout model, the area optimizer fine-tunes the physical design using the information feedback from the layout tools. All the tools are linked by an X-window interface in which users can traverse among different tools and interactively change the design parameters. The output is linked to Lager system [7], a silicon assembler. The layout model allows a designer to interactively merge/split modules, change the shape of modules, and define the pin positions of modules. Experiments show that a considerable area improvement has been achieved using this methodology.

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