AN OPTIMAL SCHEDULING APPROACH USING LOWER-BOUND IN HIGH-LEVEL SYNTHESIS

This paper describes an optimal scheduling approach which finds the scheduling result of the minimum Functional unit cost under the given timing constraint. In this method, a well-defined search space is constructed incrementally and traversed in a branch-and-bound manner. During the traversal, tighter lower bounds are estimated and utilized coupled with the upper bound on the optimal solution in pruning the search space effectively. This method is extended to support multi-cycling operations, operation chaining, pipelined functional units, and pipelined data paths. Experimental results on some benchmarks show the efficiency of the proposed approach.