The FSM network model for behavioral synthesis of control-dominated machines

Abstract

Since many ASICs are dominated by control functions, control-dominated architectures form an important domain for behavioral synthesis. It is proposed to model control-dominated architectures during behavioral synthesis as networks of communicating finite state machines (FSMs). The model more directly reflects behavior and allows more accurate cost estimation, especially for control, than do traditional data-directed representations for control-dominated machines. It is shown how to implement a number of important compiler optimizations on the FSM network model.<>