Efficient composition of scenario-based hardware specifications

• Published in: Chronic diseases and translational medicine 2019-03, Vol.13 (2), p.57-69
• Main Authors: de Gennaro, Alessandro, Stankaitis, Paulius, Mokhov, Andrey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Automation; behavioural composition approaches; behavioural synthesis; Boolean; Codes; complex hardware systems; composition constraints; concurrency (computers); Design; efficient hardware implementation; explicit concurrency models; Graphs; highly concurrent systems; high‐level descriptions; high‐level synthesis; open‐source EDA tool; partial order scenarios; Research Article; scenario‐based hardware specifications; scenario‐based specification; Variables
• ISSN: 1751-8601; 1751-861X; 2095-882X; 1751-861X; 2589-0514
• DOI: 10.1049/iet-cdt.2018.5073

Complex hardware systems can be designed by breaking down their behaviour into high-level descriptions of constituent scenarios and then composing these scenarios into an efficient hardware implementation using a form of high-level synthesis. There are a few existing methodologies for such scenario-based specification and synthesis, and in this study, the authors focus on highly concurrent systems, whose scenarios are typically described using explicit concurrency models such as partial orders. They propose a new algorithm for the composition of partial order scenarios. Unlike previously published methods, the proposed algorithm supports composition constraints, which allow the designer to restrict certain aspects of the composition in order to reuse legacy intellectual property (IP). Furthermore, the authors implementation is more scalable and can cope with specifications comprising hundreds of scenarios at the cost of only $\simeq 5\percnt $≃5% of area overhead compared to optimal solutions obtained by the exhaustive search. The proposed algorithm is implemented in an open-source electronic design automation (EDA) tool, validated on a set of benchmarks, and compared to the state-of-the-art behavioural composition approaches and to other existing methodologies that make use of behavioural synthesis.