Improving Performance and Reducing Power with Hardware Acceleration

Modern electronic design automation tools can be
used to apply a variety of transformations to
hardware blocks in an effort to achieve performance
and power savings. A number of such transformations
require tools with intimate knowledge of the
design's timing characteristics. Static timing
analysis estimates the worst-case timing behavior of
hardware data flow graphs. The static timing
analyzer described in this book operates on
data flow graphs which are generated as intermediate
representations within a C to VHDL hardware
acceleration compiler. Two additional tools were
then developed which utilize the results of the
static timing analysis. An automated pipelining
tool was developed to increase the throughput of
large blocks of combinational logic generated by the
compiler. Another tool was designed to mitigate
power consumption resulting from combinational
glitching. By inserting special signal buffers with
preselected propagation delays, known as delay
elements, functional units can be kept inactive
until their inputs stabilize. This book explores
these tools as well as the various design tradeoffs
resulting from their use.