Compiler transformations in hardware synthesis of Mpeg2 codes

High-level synthesis is the technique that translates high-level programming language programs into equivalent hardware descriptions. The use of conventional programming languages as input to high-level synthesis is challenging, due to the conceptual differences between software programs and hardware descriptions, but is nonetheless becoming the preferred input to high-level synthesis tools. Compilers play an important role in this process, since they can not only bridge such differences, thus making high-level synthesis tools better accepted by the scientific community, but they can also apply code transformations that target an optimized hardware output. In this paper, we discuss a number of transformations that can be implemented in the C language front end of the CCC high-level synthesis tool. We present experiments of such transformations conducted on the MPEG2 open-source code, which prove that compiler optimizations can have a significant positive impact in high-level synthesis tools.