Bit-Length Optimization Method for High-Level Synthesis Based on Non-linear Programming Technique

Nobuhiro DOI
Takashi HORIYAMA
Masaki NAKANISHI
Shinji KIMURA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E89-A    No.12    pp.3427-3434
Publication Date: 2006/12/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1093/ietfec/e89-a.12.3427
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on VLSI Design and CAD Algorithms)
Category: System Level Design
Keyword: 
HDL,  high-level synthesis,  bit-length optimization,  non-linear programming,  

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Summary: 
High-level synthesis is a novel method to generate a RT-level hardware description automatically from a high-level language such as C, and is used at recent digital circuit design. Floating-point to fixed-point conversion with bit-length optimization is one of the key issues for the area and speed optimization in high-level synthesis. However, the conversion task is a rather tedious work for designers. This paper introduces automatic bit-length optimization method on floating-point to fixed-point conversion for high-level synthesis. The method estimates computational errors statistically, and formalizes an optimization problem as a non-linear problem. The application of NLP technique improves the balancing between computational accuracy and total hardware cost. Various constraints such as unit sharing, maximum bit-length of function units can be modeled easily, too. Experimental result shows that our method is fast compared with typical one, and reduces the hardware area.

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