Hardware Reusability Optimization for High-Level Synthesis of Component-Based Processors
Xiahua Liu, Defu Cao, Qinshu Chen · 2022
High-level synthesis provides automatic generation for RTL codes such as Verilog, and describes the hardware circuit by using high level language to meet the requirements and accelerate the development flow. At present, many high-level synthesis tools use typical compiler techniques and infrastructures to translate those high-level languages (such as chisel) into circuit description (such as Verilog). Most of the generated designs lack readability, which makes it difficult to optimize further. On the other hand, the software compilation framework may not make full use of the parallelism and reusability of hardware circuits in time and space, which leads to resource waste and affects the performance of the final design. Based on the utilization of hardware reusability, this paper optimizes the hardware compilation framework of FIRRTL. It considers resource reuse and equivalent transformation of priorities. Experiments on RISC-V chips and commercial EDA tools show that these optimizations can reduce the design area by 9.65% with slight improvement in performance.