Optimising and adapting high-level hardware designs

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach that focuses on rapid development and maintenance of optimised hardware designs using a high-level parallel language. We use an existing timing model that states, for instance, that every assignment executes in one clock cycle. This strict timing model gives users control over design scheduling, such as managing the number of cycles and cycle time. Our main contribution is the introduction of a flexible timing model that abstracts optimisation details by supporting high-level transformations and automatic scheduling. Furthermore, we provide techniques that unschedule parallel designs, so that they can be rescheduled to meet new performance and hardware constraints, making designs as implementation independent as possible. With both models, manual development and computerised optimisation can be interleaved to achieve the best effect. Our approach is illustrated by a case study where we port a pipelined convolver to another platform, and achieve either a 300% speedup or a 50% reduction in resource usage.