System level synthesis of hardware for DSP applications using pre-characterized function implementations

SYLVA is a system level synthesis framework that transforms DSP sub-systems modeled as synchronous data flow into hardware implementations in ASIC, FPGAs or CGRAs. SYLVA synthesizes in terms of pre-characterized function implementations (FIMPs). It explores the design space in three dimensions, number of FIMPs, type of FIMPs and pipeline parallelism between the producing and consuming FIMPs. We introduce timing and interface model of FIMPs to enable reuse and automatic generation of Global Inter-connect and Control (GLIC) to glue the FIMPs together into a working system. SYLVA has been evaluated by applying it to five realistic DSP applications and results analyzed for design space exploration, efficacy in generating GLIC by comparing to manually generated GLIC and accuracy of design space exploration by comparing the area and energy costs considered during the design space exploration based on pre-characterized FIMPs and the final results.