Derivation of Efficient FSM from Loop Nests

International audiencePipelined execution is one of the most important optimizations in hardware design to improve hardware utilization rate, and hence the throughput. Loop pipelining is a transformation available in High Level Synthesis tools to execute multiple iterations of a loop in a pipeline. Nested loop pipelining is a related technique that improves hardware utilization rate when the iteration count of the inner most loop is small. However, it is also known to increase the complexity of the control, and hence degrading frequency. In this paper, we present an automatic transformation targe ting HLS that improves the effectiveness of nested loop pipelining, by efficient implementations of the control-path. Specifically, we present (i) an analytical model that captures the trade-off between gain in cycles and loss in frequency, (ii), automatic derivation of efficient Finite State Machine from loop nests, and (iii) an efficient implementation of the derived FSM that improves the performance of synthesized hardware