Soft Scheduling for Hardware

Abstract

Hardware designs typically combine parallelism and resource-sharing; a circuit’s correctness relies on shared resources being accessed mutually exclusively. Conventional high-level synthesis systems guarantee mutual exclusion by statically serialising access to shared resources during a compile-time process called scheduling. This approach suffers from two problems: (i) there is a large class of practical designs which cannot be scheduled statically; and (ii) a statically fixed schedule removes some opportunities for parallelism leading to less efficient circuits.

This paper surveys the expressivity of current scheduling methods and presents a new approach which alleviates the above problems: first scheduling logic is automatically generated to resolve contention for shared resources dynamically; then static analysis techniques remove redundant scheduling logic.

We call our method Soft Scheduling to highlight the analogy with Soft Typing: the aim is to retain the flexibility of dynamic scheduling whilst using static analysis to remove as many dynamic checks as possible.