Concurrency-Enhancing Transformations for Asynchronous Behavioral Specifications

Concurrency-Enhancing Transformations for Asynchronous Behavioral Specifications Public Deposited

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Creator

Hansen, John B.
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Computer Science

Abstract

State-of-the-art synthesis tools for the design of asynchronous systems rely on syntax-driven translation of behavioral specifications. While these tools provide the benefit of rapid design, they are severely limited in the performance of their resulting implementations (e.g., 10-100 MHz). This research proposes a synthesis approach that builds upon the existing state-of-the-art tools, preserving rapid design times and allowing for an order of magnitude increase in performance. In particular, this thesis proposes a powerful approach to enhance the concurrency of the original behavioral specifications. The proposed approach is a “source-to-source” transformation of the original behavioral specification into a new behavioral specification using two specific optimizations: automatic parallelization and automatic pipelining. The approach has been implemented in an automated design tool and applied to a suite of examples for validation. All examples were synthesized to the gate level after optimization and compared with the original, non-optimized versions. Results indicate improvement in throughput by a factor of up to 23X and a reduction in latency by up to 72%.

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