Share with care: A quantitative evaluation of sharing approaches in high-level synthesis

Abstract

This paper focuses on the resource sharing problem when performing high-level synthesis. It argues that the conventionally accepted synthesis flow when resource sharing is done after scheduling is sub-optimal because it cannot account for timing penalties from resource merging. The paper describes a competitive approach when resource sharing and scheduling are performed simultaneously. It provides a quantitative evaluation of both approaches and shows that performing sharing during scheduling wins over the conventional approach in terms of quality of results.