High-level synthesis with reconfigurable datapath components

High-level synthesis is becoming more popular as design densities keep increasing, especially in the ASIC design world. Although FPGA design follows ASIC design methodologies and FPGA densities are increasing too, programmable devices also offer the advantage of partial reconfiguration, which allows an algorithm to be partially mapped into a small and fixed FPGA device that can be reconfigured at run time, as the mapped application changes its requirements. This paper presents a novel resource constrained high-level synthesis scheduling heuristic, which utilizes reconfigurable datapath components. The resulting schedule can be shortened so as the gain in clock cycles can overcome the timing overhead of reconfiguration. The main advantage of the proposed methodology is that through run time reconfiguration, more complicated algorithms can be mapped into smaller devices without speed degradation