Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Traditional High-Level Synthesis (HLS) techniques do not allow reuse of complex, realistic datapath components during the tasks of scheduling and allocation. However, such datapath components are often custom designed and placed in technology libraries and databooks for potential reuse in future designs. We present a novel scheduling approach that, for the first time, permits reuse of such datapath components during HLS. Given a library of user-defined datapath components, an allocation of components from this library, and a limit on the maximum propagation delay through the datapath components, our algorithm generates an effective schedule for a given input behavior. We present experimental results of our approach on some HLS benchmarks using realistic combinatorial datapath components. Since the scheduling technique works on user-defined templates of datapath components and uses the delay information from the library for the components, we believe our approach can significantly impact design productivity through the reuse of complex RT datapath components.