Intellectual property (IP) core based design is an emerging design methodology to deal with increasing chip design complexity. C/C++ based high level synthesis (HLS) is also gaining traction as a design methodology to deal with increasing design complexity. In the work presented here, we present a design methodology that combines these two individual methodologies and is therefore more powerful. We discuss our proposed methodology in the context of supporting efficient hardware synthesis of a class of mathematical functions without altering original C/C++ source code. Additionally, we also discuss and propose methods to integrate legacy IP cores in existing HLS flows. Relying on concepts from the domains of program recognition and optimized low level implementations of such arithmetic functions, the described design methodology is a step towards intelligent synthesis where application characteristics are matched with specific architectural resources and relevant IP cores in a transparent manner for improved area-delay results. The combined methodology is more aware of the target hardware architecture than the conventional HLS flow. Implementation results of certain compute kernels from a commercial tool Vivado-HLS as well as proposed flow are also compared to show that proposed flow gives better results. 1. Introduction C/C++ based high level synthesis has been gaining momentum to deal with the increasing design complexity. Various academic [1, 2] and commercial tools [3, 4] have been introduced. Similarly, intellectual property (IP) core based design has also been proposed to deal with increasing design complexity. Since IP cores are preverified and optimized for a specific task and in some cases can also be configured to support different compute modes; they ease the task of a designer. IP reuse is another dominant factor in evolving design methodologies to deal with design complexity as well as smaller time to market (TTM) windows. We propose a design methodology in this paper that combines IP based design with HLS. We focus on smaller IP cores which typically implement some arithmetic function. A representative list of standard arithmetic in-built functions available in C/C++ is shown in Table 1. The complete list can be found in [5, 6]. It is the IP cores at this level of granularity that we use in the current work. In Section 5, we discuss extending our approach to larger IP cores. Table 1: Representative list of standard arithmetic functions in C/C++. Traditional HLS flow involves the processes of resource allocation, scheduling, and hardware
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