Datapath scheduling for conditional resource sharing

A new approach is described for the datapath scheduling of behavioral descriptions containing nested conditional branches of arbitrary structures. This paper formulates a time-constrained scheduling problem as a 0-1 integer programming problem, in which each constraint is expressed in the form of a Boolean function, and a satisfiability problem is defined by the product of the Boolean functions. A procedure is then described, which intends to seek an optimal solution by means of a branch-and-bound method on a binary decision diagram representing the satisfiability problem. Experimental results show that our approach attains better solutions than other existing methods.