A formal approach to the slack driven scheduling problem in high-level synthesis

With the advent of deep sub-micron era, there is a growing need to consider the design closure problem in high-level synthesis. Previous work has shown that the slack (in terms of the number of clock cycles) is an effective means of tolerating variations in operation delays. In this paper, we propose an integer linear programming (ILP) approach for the slack driven scheduling problem. Our objective is to maximize the total useable slack under the design constraints (timing and resource). Compared with previous works our approach has the following two advantages: first, our approach guarantees the optimality; secondly, our approach is more suitable for the design space exploration.