Title :
Techniques for minimizing and balancing I/O during functional partitioning
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., California Univ., Riverside, CA, USA
fDate :
1/1/1999 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
Recent work has demonstrated numerous benefits of functionally partitioning a behavioral process into mutually exclusive subprocesses before synthesizing each process into a custom digital-hardware processor. A key problem during partitioning is minimizing the input/output (I/O) pins or wires between processors. The traditional structural partitioning approach is strongly restricted by such I/O. We previously showed that the new approach of functional partitioning eases this restriction. We now demonstrate a further relaxation of the I/O restriction by introducing the FunctionBus interprocessor bus and the port-calling functional transformation. The FunctionBus allows choice of any size for internal I/O by trading off I/O size for performance, while port calling allows distribution of external I/O almost arbitrarily among modules. We describe experiments showing large I/O reductions through these techniques, with only small performance penalties
Keywords :
VLSI; circuit CAD; embedded systems; hardware-software codesign; high level synthesis; integrated circuit design; FunctionBus interprocessor bus; I/O balancing; I/O minimization; behavioral process; custom digital-hardware processor; functional partitioning; input/output pins; mutually exclusive subprocesses; port-calling functional transformation; Embedded system; Energy consumption; Field programmable gate arrays; Packaging; Pins; Runtime; Signal processing; Signal synthesis; Very large scale integration; Wires;
Journal_Title :
Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Transactions on
