Multispeculative additive trees in High-Level Synthesis

Abstract

Multispeculative Functional Units (MSFUs) are arithmetic functional units that operate using several predictors for the carry signal. The carry prediction helps to shorten the critical path of the functional unit. The average performance of these units is determined by the hit rate of the prediction. In spite of utilizing more than one predictor, none or only one additional cycle is enough for producing the correct result in the majority of the cases. In this paper we present multispeculation as a way of increasing the performance of tree structures with a negligible area penalty. By judiciously introducing these structures into computation trees, it will only be necessary to predict in certain selected nodes, thus minimizing the number of operations that can potentially mispredict. Hence, the average latency will be diminished and thus performance will be increased. Our experiments show that it is possible to improve on average 24% and 38% execution time, when considering logarithmic and linear modules, respectively.