Improving Performance and Reducing Power with Hardware Acceleration - Static Timing Analysis Based Transformations of Combinational Logic in a High Le

ISBN-13: 9783639106909 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 96 str.

Colin J. Ihrig; Alex K. Jones

Opis

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 designs 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.

O autorze

Colin J. Ihrig received his B.S. and M.S. in 2005 and 2008 and
is currently pursing his Ph.D. in CoE from the Univ. of
Pittsburgh. Alex K. Jones received his B.S. in Physics in 1998
from William and Mary and his M.S. and Ph.D. in ECE from
Northwestern Univ. in 2000 and 2002. He is currently a faculty
member at the Univ. of Pittsburgh.