From C to elastic circuits
Lana Josipović, Philip Brisk, Paolo Ienne · 2017
Today's high-level synthesis (HLS) tools rely on static scheduling. When control and/or data dependencies that cannot be resolved at compile time are present in program code, HLS tools produce pessimistic schedules based on worst-case assumptions, which may not be the common case or may never even occur in practice. At present, the only alternative is for circuit designers to eschew HLS, and to instead implement dynamic scheduling, which stalls or slows execution when control or data hazards manifest themselves at runtime, in hardware. This paper examines these issues in detail using a histogram kernel as a case-study. Starting with an inefficiently scheduled implementation produced by Vivado HLS, we introduce a latency-insensitive control mechanism that enables reaching a point in the design space that Vivado HLS could not discover on its own. We describe a step-by-step process by which a compiler could infer a dynamically scheduled circuit, starting from a high-level C language specification.