| FUNCTION CALL OPTIMISATION IN SYSTEMC HARDWARE COMPILATION (2009) | |||||||||||||||
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| Functions are commonly used in SystemC and other highlevel languages to divide code into separate tasks. During synthesis, a hardware compiler can instantiate logic for each function call. Alternatively, a function can be mapped to a separate piece of hardware that is shared between calls to the function. This process, called function exlining, can significantly improve logic usage of a design. This paper investigates the benefits of function exlining in hardware compilaton and proposes a method for implementing this optimisation in SystemC. In this method, exlining is described as a source transformation which can be easily implemented in existing compiler frameworks. The method has been implemented in a commercial SystemC hardware compiler and experiments show that exlining function calls can significantly reduce the logic size of a design. 1. | |||||||||||||||
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