High level synthesis of asynchronous circuit targeting state machine controllers

Abstract

We introduce a high-level synthesis tool that generates efficient asynchronous circuits from a language based on extended Petri-nets. A salient feature of our synthesis technique is its ability to automatically generate ensembles of interacting burst-mode FSM-based controllers and macromodule-based controllers (using macromodule synthesis capabilities developed in our earlier efforts). This is achieved by first decomposing the input description into a set of sequential threads with choices, allocating resources for the threads, and refining the threads towards burst-mode machines. Major contributions of the work reported in this paper are the generation of interacting burst-mode controllers from high-level descriptions. Details of the synthesis system and results on examples including parts of a DCT processor are presented.