Resource Sharing in Dataflow Circuits

To achieve resource-efficient hardware designs, HLS tools share (i.e., time-multiplex) functional units among operations of the same type. This optimization is typically performed together with operation scheduling to ensure the best possible unit usage at each point in time. Dataflow circuits have emerged as an alternative HLS approach to efficiently handle irregular and control-dominated code. Yet, these circuits do not have a predetermined schedule-in its absence, it is challenging to determine which operations can share a functional unit without a performance penalty. Furthermore, although sharing seems to imply only some trivial circuitry, time-multiplexing units in dataflow circuits may cause deadlock by blocking certain data transfers and preventing operations from executing. In this paper, we present a technique to automatically identify performance-acceptable resource sharing opportunities in dataflow circuits and we describe a sharing mechanism that achieves deadlock-free dataflow designs. On benchmarks obtained from C code, we show that our approach effectively implements resource sharing: it results in significant area savings (i.e., a DSP reduction of up to 81%) compared to dataflow circuits which do not support this feature and matches the sharing capabilities of a state-of-the-art HLS tool.