Dynamic AC-scheduling for hardware cores with unknown and uncertain information

Modern hardware cores necessarily have to deal with many sources of unknown or uncertain information. Components with variable latency and unpredictable behavior are becoming predominant in hardware designs. Conventional hardware cores underperform when dealing with unknown or uncertain information. Common High-Level Synthesis (HLS) approaches, which require to specify the complete behavior at design-time, present significant restrictions in supporting this kind of conditions. The literature proposes several dynamic scheduling techniques to improve the cores performance by handling inherent uncertainty of applications. However, they do not address other sources of unknown information. In this paper, we propose the dynamic Activating Conditions (AC)-scheduling: a methodology for the design automation of hardware cores which can dynamically adapt the instructions scheduling according to behaviors unknown at design-time. Neither assumptions about components latency nor worst case approach are required. Experimental results show significant performance increase, with limited area overhead, with respect to state-of-the-art approaches.