Efficient hardware controller synthesis for synchronous dataflow graph in system level design

This paper concerns automatic hardware synthesis from data flow graph (DFG) specification in system level design. In the presented design methodology, each node of a data flow graph represents a hardware library module that contains a synthesizable VHDL code. Our proposed technique automatically synthesizes a clever control structure, cascaded counter controller, that supports asynchronous interaction with outside modules while efficiently implementing the synchronous dataflow semantics of the graph at the same time. Through comparison with previous works with some examples, the novelty of the proposed technique is demonstrated.