Dynamic branch prediction for high-level synthesis

Abstract

Branch prediction is a widely used technique to optimize performances of pipelined microprocessor architectures. In High-Level Synthesis (HLS) domain, few synthesis techniques for optimizing control flows of data dominated applications have been proposed. Previous works mainly focus on using techniques like path-based scheduling algorithms, speculation techniques or static branch prediction for pipelined loops. In this paper, we present a synthesis flow that combines dynamic branch prediction and operation speculation to remove performance bottlenecks imposed by the control flow of applications. Interest of the proposed approach is shown in term of latency improvements and area overhead through a set of experiments.