High-level synthesis of multi-process behavioral descriptions

This paper presents a new high-level synthesis methodology to generate optimized implementations for multi-process behavioral descriptions. The concurrent communicating processes specification paradigm is widely used in digital circuit and system design, and is employed in all popular hardware description languages. It has been shown that inter-process communication and synchronization can result in complex timing inter-dependencies, which significantly affect the performance of a multi-process system. In this paper, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art high-level synthesis tools can generate significantly sub-optimal implementations for behaviors that contain concurrent communicating processes. We present an analysis of how inter-process communication impacts high-level synthesis steps, and describe a new methodology to adapt existing high-level synthesis tools to optimize multi-process descriptions.