Synthesis of optimized hardware transactors from abstract communication specifications

Abstract

Increasing system complexity and heterogeneity make system integration and communication synthesis a growing concern. Even with transaction-level modeling and high-level synthesis of hardware, communication interfaces still have to be manually designed at a low protocol level. To address this challenge, we present a design flow for automatic synthesis of hardware transactors, which realize abstractly specified communication semantics on top of protocol-level transactions. Transactor synthesis is tightly coupled with high-level synthesis of computation for integrated computation/communication co-design of complete hardware processors, thus establishing a seamless path from abstract system specifications down to hardware implementations in synthesizable RTL. The flow supports a generic set of communication semantics and target implementations, where transactors are custom-generated for a specific application and architecture combination. Furthermore, we develop protocol stack optimizations that reduce the area and performance overhead of synthesized communication interfaces. We have applied our synthesis flow to several industrial-strength examples under various communication settings. Results show that synthesized interfaces are comparable to manual designs in terms of area and latency, where protocol stack optimizations can reduce area and latency overhead by up to 77% and 21%, respectively.