PipeLink: A Pipelined Resource Sharing System for Dataflow High-Level Synthesis

Dynamically scheduled high-level synthesis (HLS) is an approach to HLS that maps programs into dataflow circuits. These circuits use distributed control for communication and therefore can be automatically pipelined. However, pipelined function call is challenging due to the absence of centralized control, thus general software programs cannot be well-supported by the HLS tools. Traditional solutions to this problem impose restrictions on pipelining when accessing the shared functions. We present PipeLink, a modular synthesis method that decomposes the synthesis into compilation stage and linking stage, which enables the fully-pipelined access to shared functions in dataflow circuits. We develop a complete HLS engine using this approach and use asynchronous circuits as the target implementation. Our engine supports pipelined access to shared function units, as well as pipelined memory access in a unified fashion. Compared to existing HLS tools, PipeLink results in 20X reduction in energy and 1.56 X improvement in throughput.