A simultaneous module selection, scheduling, and allocation method considering operation chaining with multi-functional units
A Multi-Functional unit has several functions and these can be changed with a control signal. For High-Level Synthesis, using Multi-Functions units in operation chaining make it possible to obtaining the solution with the same number of control steps and less resources compared to that without them. This paper proposes an operation chaining method considering Multi-Functional units. The method formulates module selection, scheduling, and functional unit allocation with operation chaining as a 0/1 integer linear problem and obtains optimal solution with minimum number of control steps under area and clock-cycle type constraints. The first contribution of this paper is to propose the global search for operation chaining with Multi-Functional units having multiple outputs as well as with single output. The second contribution is to condier the area constraint as a resource constraint instead (if the type and number of functional units. Experimental results show that chaining with Multi-Functional units is effective and the proposed method is useful to evaluate heuristic algorithms.
module selection scheduling allocation operation chaining high-level synthesis integer linear programming