High-Level Synthesis for Designing Multimode Architectures

This paper addresses the design of multimode architectures for digital signal and image processing applications. We present a dedicated design flow and its associated high-level synthesis tool, named GAUT. Given a unified description of a set of time-wise mutually exclusive tasks and their associated throughput constraints, a single register transfer level hardware architecture optimized in area is generated. In order to reduce the register, the steering logic, and the controller complexities, this paper proposes a joint-scheduling algorithm, which maximizes the similarities between the control steps and specific binding approaches for both operators and storage elements which maximize the similarities between the datapaths. It is shown through a set of test cases that the proposed approach offers significant area saving and low-performance penalties compared to both state-of-the-art techniques and dedicated mono-mode architectures.