Scheduling and Resource Binding Algorithm Considering Timing Variation

Abstract

The timing closure problem (e.g., meeting timing/clock period constraint) is one of the most important problems in the design automation. However, the rapid increase of the impact of the process variation on circuit timing makes the problem much more complicated and unpredictable to tackle in synthesis. This paper addresses a new problem of high-level synthesis (HLS) that effectively takes into account the timing variation. Conventional HLS may simply avoid the timing variation problem by considering the worst case or constant delay model of hardware resources, which are certainly not viable solutions. To overcome the impact of timing variation in HLS, this paper addresses the following two problems: 1) how can the statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) used in logic synthesis be modified and effectively applied to the delay and yield computation in HLS? and 2) how can scheduling and resource binding tasks effectively solve the HLS problem with the objective of minimizing latency under yield constraint? Through an extensive experimentation, we confirm that the proposed variation-aware HLS algorithm is able to reduce the latency by 19.7% under 90% performance yield constraint, compared with the result by conventional timing variation-unaware HLS .