On effective slack management in postscheduling phase

In this paper, we propose techniques for effective slack management in high-level synthesis. Our design methodology improves the usability of slack. This manifests itself in the form of relaxed latency constraints on resources. Relaxed latency constraints could be exploited to generate designs with better power, area, routability, and other measures. The slack-management engine has two key components: delay budgeting and resource binding. We propose a left edge traversal-based algorithm for delay budgeting. For resource binding, we developed an algorithm that applies a locally optimal binding procedure at each clock step. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy, we built an experimental flow that integrated SUIF, Synopsys Design Compiler, Cadence Silicon Ensemble, and our own optimization tools. Experiments with the MediaBench suite shows that our methodology could generate designs with better quality than designs and faster design closure when compared with designs generated without slack management.