Hardware synthesis from coarse-grained dataflow specification for fast HW/SW cosynthesis

This paper concerns automatic hardware synthesis from data flow graph (DFG) specification for fast HW/SW cosynthesis. A node in DFG represents a coarse grain block such as FIR and DCT and a port in a block may consume multiple data samples per invocation, which distinguishes our approach from behavioral synthesis and complicates the problem. In the presented design methodology, a dataflow graph with specified algorithm can be mapped to various hardware structures according to the resource allocation and schedule information. This simplifies the management of the area/performance tradeoff in hardware design and widens the design space of hardware implementation of a dataflow graph compared with the previous approaches. Through experiments with some examples, the usefulness of the proposed technique is demonstrated.