Proposal
Today's popular hardware description languages (HDLs) typically
discard locality information (e.g. VHDL, Verilog). Thus the router is
given a sea of gates without any hints about critical paths.
Consequently it performs a general optimisation on this huge mass of
gates which takes a considerable time.
However, the designer often knows about critical paths. For example,
if you are designing an adder then you know that the carry chain is a
critical path. Thus, you would like to place carry generation logic
of an adder in one locality. In fact the designer has probably
specified the adder as one logical unit, but still the HDL throws this
information away. These constraints may make the place and route
simpler and, thus, faster.
There is probably at least one Ph.D. in this project. None the less,
a simplified version could be developed and built upon by a good
Tripos student.
Previous work
Satnam
Sing in Glasgow is doing some work in this area. There is also a
bissare stack based language with 2D program counter called Befunge!
Special resources
None.
Possible supervisors
I'm willing to supervise this project.
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