High-level synthesis of digital integrated circuits in the nanoscale mobile electronics era

The increasing power consumption levels of integrated circuits (ICs) have become a major concern of the semiconductor industry. Excessive power dissipation causes overheating, which can lead to soft errors or permanent damage. It also limits battery life in portable equipment. High power consumption can be reduced by properly increasing area. However, arbitrarily large area, namely high number of functional units (FU) in high-level view, dramatically increases IC cost. This paper describes a new dynamic-power aware High Level Synthesis data path approach that considers dynamic FU allocation while attempting to minimize area, power, or make a trade-off between them. The experimental results have shown that when the area is nearly the same, our approach delivers a 5.99% reduction in power consumption. And when the power consumption is nearly the same, a 11.81% reduction in total FU area occurs. And we can obtain different optimal power–area trade-off values by adjusting power and area ratios.

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Are HLS Tools Healthy? The C-Cubed Project

Engineering, Technology & Applied Science Research ◽

10.48084/etasr.557 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 790-794

Author(s):

M. Dossis ◽

G. Dimitriou

Keyword(s):

Integrated Circuits ◽

Systems Engineering ◽

Critical Role ◽

Formal System ◽

Electronic System ◽

System Level ◽

High Level Synthesis ◽

Practical Reasons ◽

Engineering Practice ◽

High Level

The increasing complexity of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) that incorporate custom and standard embedded core IP blocks dictates the need for a new generation of automated and formal system EDA tools and methodologies. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) plays a critical role in the required Electronic System Level (ESL) methodologies. However, most of the available academic and commercial High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools still do not play an established role in the system and hardware engineering teams. This is true for a number of practical reasons, analyzed and discussed in this work. The present article is a practical perspective of the required fully automated and formal tools, which are needed to constitute integral parts in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flows. In addition, this article is a useful guide to the system engineer who wants to familiarize with HLS tools and to select the appropriate tool for the everyday engineering practice. The advanced HLS toolset that is analyzed in this paper is developed by the first author, its C-frontend by the second author, and they are both based on formal methods and fully automated techniques, thus they guarantee the correctness of the synthesized hardware implementations. This paper completes with a number of experiments that were executed using the author’s methodology and they are used to evaluate the specific HLS tools. Consequently, a number of conclusions are drawn as well as suggestions for the future directions of HLS technology. In this way, what is practically needed by the hardware systems engineering community is outlined at the end of the paper.

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