Area efficient DSP datapath synthesis

COBRA is a behavioral high level synthesis tool for datapath dominated applications. It uses a regular architecture which has been previously shown to significantly reduce the area of synthesised datapaths and integrates the traditional scheduling, allocation and binding tasks into one global optimisation. Optimisation is performed using simulated annealing in a three dimensional space termed "datapath space". Unlike previous approaches, COBRA uses the actual dataflow defined by the behavioural description to imply a datapath. The combination of the datapath space concept and target architecture gives COBRA a strong relationship between behavioural and physical domains and provides area efficient, globally optimising datapath synthesis.