Timing variation-aware high-level synthesis

Abstract

The timing closure problem 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 work addresses a new problem of high-level synthesis (HLS) that effectively takes into account the timing variation. Specifically, the work addresses the following four problems: (1) how can the statistical static timing analysis (SSTA) used in logic synthesis be modified and applied to the delay and yield computation in HLS? (2) how does the resource binding affect yield? (3) how does the scheduling affect yield? (4) how can scheduling and resource binding tasks be combined together to efficiently solve the problem with the objective of minimizing latency under yield constraint?