Hierarchical conditional dependency graphs as a unifying design representation in the CODESIS high-level synthesis system

In high-level hardware synthesis (HLS), there is a gap in the quality of the synthesized results between data-flow and control-flow dominated behavioral descriptions. Heuristics destined for the former usually perform poorly on the latter. To close this gap, the CODESIS interactive HLS tool relies on a unifying intermediate design representation and adapted heuristics that are able to accommodate both types of designs, as well as designs of a mixed data-flow and control-flow nature. Preliminary experimental results in mutual exclusiveness detection and in efficiently scheduling conditional behaviors, are encouraging and prompt for more extensive experimentation.