Automatic pipelining from transactional datapath specifications

Abstract—We present a transactional datapath specification (Tspec) and the tool (T-piper) to synthesize automatically an inpelined implementation from it. T-spec abstractly views a datapath as executing one transaction at a time, computing next system states based on current ones. From a T-spec, T-piper can synthesize a pipelined implementation that preserves original transaction semantics, while allowing simultaneous execution of multiple overlapped transactions across pipeline stages. T-piper not only ensures the correctness of pipelined executions, but can also employ forwarding and speculation to minimize performance loss due to data dependencies. Design case studies on RISC and CISC processor pipeline development are reported.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: DATE
• Authors: Eriko Nurvitadhi, James C. Hoe, Timothy Kam, Shih-Lien Lu
• Keywords: Datapath, DATE 2010, Hardware, Original Transaction Semantics, Transactional Datapath Specification