The synthesis of a hardware scheduler for non-manifest loops

Abstract

This paper addresses the hardware implementation of a dynamic scheduler for non-manifest data dependent periodic loops. Static scheduling techniques which are known to give near optimal scheduling-solutions for manifest loops, fail at scheduling non-manifest loops, since they lack the run time information needed which makes a static schedule feasible. In this paper a dynamic scheduling approach was chosen to circumvent this problem. We present a case study using VHDL where the focus lies on implementations with minimal memory usage and low communication overhead between various components of the architecture. This has resulted in an efficient and synthesisable system.