Combined control flow dominated and data flow dominated high-levelsynthesis

摘要

This paper presents the design of a Videophone Coder-DecoderMotion Estimator using two High-Level Synthesis tools. Indeed, thecombination of a Control Flow Dominated part (complex communicationprotocol) with a Data Flow Dominated part (high throughput computations)makes this circuit difficult to be synthesized by a single HLS tool. Thecombination of two HLS tools for the high-level design of this operatorrequired the definition of a sophisticated design flow allowingmixed-level and multi-language simulations. When compared to designstarting from RTL specifications, HLS induces only a negligible areaoverhead of 5%, and provides gain in description length (divided by 5),design time and flexibility