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

This paper describes an optimal scheduling approach which finds the sc heduling result of the minimum Functional unit cost under the given ti ming constraint. In this method, a well-defined search space is constr ucted incrementally and traversed in a branch-and-bound manner. During the traversal, tighter lower bounds are estimated and utilized couple d with the upper bound on the optimal solution in pruning the search s pace effectively. This method is extended to support multi-cycling ope rations, operation chaining, pipelined functional units, and pipelined data paths. Experimental results on some benchmarks show the efficien cy of the proposed approach.