Automatic Generation of Massively Parallel Hardware from Control-Intensive Sequential Programs

High-level synthesis has been envisaged as a suitable methodology to design and deliver on time, at least large parts of today’s complex IC systems. This paper describes a unified and integrated HLS framework, to automatically produce custom and massively-parallel hardware, including its memory and system interfaces from high-level sequential program code. Using compiler-generators and logic programming techniques, provably-correct hardware compilation flow is achieved. The utilized hardware optimization inference engine is driven by a set of resource constraints, which limit to a certain boundary the number of available hardware operators to function in parallel during each control step. This optimization reduces drastically the number of different control steps (states) of the implemented application. The hardware compilation runs are completed in orders-of-magnitude less time than that which would be needed by even very experienced HDL designers to implement the same applications in RTL code. Implementation results from synthesis of a number of control-dominated, linear and repetitive, applications including a MPEG video compression engine with up to a few hundred states, are presented. In all cases the HLS framework delivers quickly provably-correct, implementable RTL code and the optimized schedule is reduced at up to 30% in comparison with the initial schedule.