SpC: synthesis of pointers in C application of pointer analysis to the behavioral synthesis from C

Abstract

As designers may model mixed software-hardware systems using a subset of C or C++, we present SpC, a solution to synthesize and optimize a C model with pointers. In hardware, a pointer is not only the address of data in memory, but it may also reference multiple variables mapped to registers, ports or wires. Pointer analysis is used to find the point-to-set of each pointer in the program. We address the problem of synthesizing and optimizing pointers to multiple variables and array elements. Temporary variables are defined to optimize loads and stores by minimizing the number of live variables. The combinational logic can also be reduced by encoding the pointer values. An implementation using the SUIF framework is presented, followed by some case studies such as the synthesis of a 2D IDCT.