High-level synthesis of control and memory intensive applications

Recent developments in microelectronic technology and CAD technology allow production of larger and larger integrated circuits in shorter and shorter design times. At the same time, the abstraction level of specifications is getting higher both to cover the increased complexity of systems more efficiently and to make the design process less error prone. Although High-Level Synthesis (HLS) has been successfully used in many cases, it is still not as indispensable today as layout or logic synthesis. Various application specific synthesis strategies have been developed to cope with the problems of general HLS strategies. In this thesis solutions for the following sub-tasks of HLS, targeting control and memory intensive applications (CMIST) are presented. An internal representation is an important element of design methodologies and synthesis tools. IRSYD (Internal Representation for System Description) has been developed to meet various requirements for internal representations. It is specifically targeted towards representation of heterogeneous systems with multiple front-end languages and to facilitate the integration of several design and validation tools. The memory access bandwidth is one of the main design bottlenecks in control and data-transfer dominated applications such as protocol processing and multimedia. These applications are often characterized by the use of dynamically allocated data structures. A methodology has been developed to minimize not only the total number of data-transfers by merging memory accesses, but also to minimize the total storage by reducing bit-width wastage. An efficient control-flow based scheduling strategy, segment-based scheduling, has been developed to avoid the typical disadvantages of most of the control-flow based schedulers. T...