A novel allocation strategy for control and memory intensive telecommunication circuits

Abstract

Communication sub-systems that deal with switching, routing and protocol implementation often have their functionality dominated by control logic and interaction with memory. Synthesis of such Control and Memory Intensive Systems (hereafter abbreviated to CMISTs) poses demands that in the past have not been met satisfactorily by general purpose high-level synthesis (HLS) tools and have led to several research efforts to address these demands. In this paper we: Characterise CMISTs from the synthesis viewpoint; Contend that the synthesis demands of CMISTs can be met within the framework of a general purpose High-level synthesis tool, by making parts of it adaptive to the input, rather than develop a complete tool for a particular type of application; Present an allocation strategy that automatically adapts for CMISTs; Present the Operation and Maintenance (OAM) Protocol of the ATM, its modelling in VHDL and synthesis aspects of the VHDL model; Present the results of applying the synthesis methodology to the OAM as a test case. The results are compared with the result from two commercial High-level synthesis tool; Prove the efficacy of the proposed synthesis methodology by applying it to an industrial design and comparing our obtained by designing manually at register-transfer level; The results is also compared with the results from two commercial HLS tools.