A constraint driven approach to loop pipelining and register binding

Abstract

Code generation methods for DSP applications are hampered by the combination of tight timing constraints imposed by the performance requirements of DSP algorithms, and resource constraints imposed by a hardware architecture. In this paper, we present a method for register binding and instruction scheduling based on the exploitation and analysis of resource- and timing constraints. The analysis identifies sequencing constraints between operations additional to the precedence constraints. Without the explicit modeling of these sequencing constraints, a scheduler is often not capable of finding a solution that satisfies the timing, resource and register constraints. The presented approach results in an efficient method of obtaining high quality instruction schedules with low register requirements.