Optimization techniques for ADL-driven RTL processor synthesis

Abstract

Nowadays, architecture description languages (ADLs) are becoming popular for speeding up the development of complex SoC design, by performing design space exploration at a higher level of abstraction. This increase in the abstraction level traditionally comes at the cost of low performance of the final application specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) implementation, which is generated automatically from the ADL. There is a pressing need for novel optimization techniques for high level synthesis from ADLs, to compensate for this loss of performance. Two important aspects of these optimizations are the efficient usage of available structural information in the high level architecture descriptions and prudent pruning of overhead, introduced by mapping from ADL to register transfer level (RTL). In this paper, we present two high level optimization techniques, path sharing and decision minimization. These optimization techniques are shown to be of lower complexity, by at least two orders, compared to similar optimization during gate-level synthesis. The optimizations are tested for a RISC architecture, a VLIW architecture and two industrial embedded processors, Motorola M68HC11 and Infineon ICORE. The results indicate a significant improvement in overall performance.