Abstract

This paper presents pipeline vectorization, a method for synthesizing hardware pipelines based on software vectorizing compilers. The method improves efficiency and ease of development of hardware designs, particularly for users with little electronics design experience. We propose several loop transformations to customize pipelines to meet hardware resource constraints, while maximizing available parallelism. For run-time reconfigurable systems, we apply hardware specialization to increase circuit utilization. Our approach is especially effective for highly repetitive computations in DSP and multimedia applications. Case studies using FPGA-based platforms are presented to demonstrate the benefits of our approach and to evaluate trade-offs between alternative implementations. The loop tiling transformation, for instance, has been found to improve vectorization performance by 30 to 40 times above a PC-based software implementation, depending on whether run-time reconfiguration is used.

Citations