Revisiting Automatic Pipelining: Gate-level Forwarding and Speculation

Pipelining is a widely applied micro-architectural performance optimization and requires non-trivial designs for better execution throughput. The key to pipeline throughput optimization is to resolve data hazards caused by read-after-write (RAW) dependencies, which are traditionally tackled by forwarding and speculation to avoid pipeline stalls. However, existing approaches are conducted based on high-level dataflow analysis, with potential loss of optimization opportunities for lack of analysis of the netlist structures.