Peter A. Milder, Franz Franchetti, James C. Hoe and Markus Püschel (Proc. Design Automation Conference (DAC), pp. 385-390, 2008)
Formal Datapath Representation and Manipulation for Implementing DSP Transforms
Comment: Best paper award nominee (10 out of 147)
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Published paper (link to publisher)
Bibtex

We present a domain-specific approach to representing datapaths for hardware implementations of linear signal transform algorithms. We extend the tensor structure for describing linear transform algorithms, adding the ability to explicitly characterize two important dimensions of datapath architecture. This representation allows both algorithm and datapath to be specified within a single formula, and gives the designer the ability to easily consider a wide space of possible datapaths at a high level of abstraction. We have constructed a formula manipulation system based upon this representation, and have written a compiler that can translate a formula into a hardware implementation. This enables an automatic “push button” compilation flow that produces a register transfer level hardware description from high-level datapath directives and an algorithm (written as a formula). In our experimental results, we demonstrate that this approach yields efficient designs over a large tradeoff space.

Keywords:
Learn the current Spiral system, IP cores for FPGA/ASIC, Discrete/fast Fourier transform

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