This paper proposes a novel Behavioral Synthesis method that tries to reduce the number of clock cycles under clock cycle time and total functional unit area constraints using special functional units efficiently. Special functional units are designed to have shorter delay and/or smaller area than the cascaded basic functional units for specific operation patterns. For example, a Multiply-Accumulator is one of them. However, special functional units may have less flexibility for resource sharing because intermediate operation results may not be able to be obtained. Hence, almost all conventional methods can not handle special functional units efficiently for the reduction of clock cycles in practical time, especially under a tight area constraint. The proposed method makes it possible to solve module selection, scheduling, and functional unit allocation problems using special functional units in practical time with some heuristics. Experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved maximally 33% reduction of the cycles for a small application and 14% reduction for a realistic application in practical time.

A Multi-Functional unit has several functions and these can be changed with a control signal. For High-Level Synthesis, using Multi-Functions units in operation chaining make it possible to obtaining the solution with the same number of control steps and less resources compared to that without them. This paper proposes an operation chaining method considering Multi-Functional units. The method formulates module selection, scheduling, and functional unit allocation with operation chaining as a 0/1 integer linear problem and obtains optimal solution with minimum number of control steps under area and clock-cycle type constraints. The first contribution of this paper is to propose the global search for operation chaining with Multi-Functional units having multiple outputs as well as with single output. The second contribution is to condier the area constraint as a resource constraint instead of the type and number of functional units. Experimental results show that chaining with Multi-Functional units is effective and the proposed method is useful to evaluate heuristic algorithms.

This paper presents a design method to minimize energy of both functional units (FUs) and an interconnection network between FUs. To reduce complexity of the interconnection network, data transfers between FUs are classified according to FU types of operations in a data flow graph. The basic idea behind reducing the complexity of the interconnection network is that the interconnection resource can be shared among data transfers with the same FU type of a source node and the same FU type of a destination node. Moreover, an efficient method based on a genetic algorithm is presented.

Since manufacturing processes inherently fluctuate, LSI chips which are produced from the same design have different propagation delays. However, the difference in delays caused by the process fluctuation has rarely been considered in most of existing high-level synthesis systems. This paper presents a new approach to module selection in high-level synthesis, which exploits the difference in functional unit delays. First, a module library model which assumes the probabilistic nature of functional unit delays is presented. Then, we propose a module selection problem and an algorithm which minimizes the cost per faultless chip. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm finds optimal module selections which would not have been explored without manufacturing information.

In order to shorten the time-to-market, Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC's) are designed from a library of pre-defined layout implementations for register-transfer modules such as multipliers, adders, RAM, ROM, etc. Current approaches to selecting the implementations from the library usually deal with their timing-area estimates and do not consider delay of the intermodule wiring. However, as sub-micron design rules are utilized for IC fabrication, wiring delay becomes comparable to the functional unit delay and can not longer be ignored even in register-transfer synthesis. In this paper we propose an algorithm that combines module selection with Performance-Driven module placement and reduces an impact of wiring on sub-micron ASIC performance. The algorithm not only efficiently exploits multiple module realizations in the design library, but also finds the module placement which minimizes wiring delay. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that considering both module and wiring issues, more than 30% reduction of the total circuit delay can be achieved.