Critical-path-aware high-level synthesis with distributed controller for fast timing closure

Abstract

Centralized controllers commonly used in high-level synthesis often require long wires and cause high load capacitance, and that is why critical paths typically occur on paths from controllers to data registers instead of paths from data registers to data registers. However, conventional high-level synthesis has focused on delays within a datapath, making it difficult to solve the timing closure problem during physical synthesis. This article presents hardware architecture with a distributed controller, which makes the timing closure problem much easier. A novel critical-path-aware high-level synthesis flow is also presented for synthesizing such hardware through datapath partitioning, register binding, and controller optimization. We explore the design space related to the number of partitions, which is an important design parameter for target architecture. According to our experiments, the proposed approach reduces the critical path delay excluding FUs by 29.3% and that including FUs by 10.0%, with 2.2% area overhead on average compared to centralized controller architecture.