s hassoun and d marculescu, “towards gals design .doc

Soha Hassoun Research Update September, 2003 Primary Research Interests Hassouns primary research interest is in the area of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) for Integrated Circuits (ICs). CAD is the discipline of creating efficient algorithms and programming them to automate many tasks needed to build multi-million transistor ICs. The IC designer then utilizes the CAD algorithms to design, analyze, and verify different aspects of an IC design. The Details Hassoun’s interests focus mainly on: Synthesis (subsections R1-R7 below), Timing Analysis (R8-R9), and Physical Design (R10). Of special interest is the synergy between these areas, such as optimal pipelining when constructing physical routes, and timing-driven synthesis. Other interests include emulation (R11), optimizations for low power (R12), and design at the circuit and architecture levels (R13). Future research plans are listed in (R14). R1. Synthesis: Hardware Threading and External Profiling. We address the optimization of application-specific hardware for multimedia and communication applications where an incoming packet or message is processed independently of other packets. Two new techniques are introduced: external profiling and hardware threading. The first technique allows the optimal partitioning of a hardware design based on an external probabilistic load. The second technique allows on-the-fly re-configuration. Unutilized hardware is borrowed to maximize task-level parallelism, which results in boosting performance or lowering power consumption. The novelty of this research is two fold. First, it is one of the early attempts to synthesize application-specific configurable components. Second, it is the first work in high-level synthesis that utilizes external profiling to achieve optimal synthesis results. Results show up to 12% performance improvements and up to 44% power dissipation reduction. A provisional patent has been filed. Related Publications: B. Swahn and S. Hassoun, Dyn