Pipeline vectorization

This paper presents pipeline vectorization, a method for synthesizing hardware pipelines based on software vectorizing compilers. The method improves efficiency and ease of development of hardware designs, particularly for users with little electronics design experience. We propose several loop transformations to customize pipelines to meet hardware resource constraints while maximizing available parallelism. For runtime reconfigurable systems, we apply hardware specialization to increase circuit utilization. Our approach is especially effective for highly repetitive computations in digital signal processor (DSP) and multimedia applications. Case studies using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)-based platforms are presented to demonstrate the benefits of our approach and to evaluate tradeoffs between alternative implementations. For instance, the loop-tiling transformation, has been found to improve vectorization performance 30-40 times above a PCbased software implementation, depending on whether runtime reconfiguration (RTR) is used