A Design Flow Engine for the Support of Customized Dynamic High Level Synthesis Flows

High Level Synthesis is a set of methodologies aimed at generating hardware descriptions starting from specifications written in high-level languages. While these methodologies share different elements with traditional compilation flows, there are characteristics of the addressed problem which require ad hoc management. In particular, differently from most of the traditional compilation flows, the complexity and the execution time of the High Level Synthesis techniques are much less relevant than the quality of the produced results. For this reason, fixed-point analyses, as well as successive refinement optimizations, can be accepted, provided that they can improve the quality of the generated designs. This article presents a design flow engine for the description and the execution of complex and customized synthesis flows. It supports dynamic addition of passes and dependencies, cyclic dependencies, and selective pass invalidation. Experimental results show the benefits of such type of design flows with respect to static linear design flows when applied to High Level Synthesis.