Rapid Prototyping of Complex Micro-architectures Through High-Level Synthesis

International audienceRegister-Transfer Level (RTL) design has been a traditional approach in hardware design for several decades. However, with the growing complexity of designs and the need for fast time-to-market, the design and verification process at the RTL level can become impractical. This has motivated for raising the abstraction level in hardware design. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) provides higher-level abstraction by automatically transforming a behavioral specification of a circuit into a low-level RTL, making it easier to design, simulate and verify complex digital systems. HLS relies on static scheduled data paths which can limit its effectiveness. This limitation makes it difficult to design the micro-architectural features of processors from an Instruction Set Architecture described in high-level languages. This work aims to demonstrate how the available features of HLS can be deployed in designing various pipelined processors micro-architecture. Our approach takes advantage of the capabilities of HLS and employs multi-threading and dynamic scheduling techniques to overcome the limitation of HLS in pipelining a processor from an Instruction Set Simulator written in C