Electrical & Computer Engineering     |     Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, April 14, 1:30-2:30 p.m. HH-1112

 

Girish Venkataramani
Carnegie Mellon University

C to Asynchronous Dataflow Circuits: An End-to-End Toolflow

 

In this talk, I will describe a complete toolflow that translates ANSI-C programs into asynchronous circuits. The toolflow is built around a compiler that converts C into a functional dataflow intermediate representation, exposing instruction-level, pipeline and memory parallelism. The compiler performs optimizations and converts the intermediate representation into pipelined asynchronous circuits, in which control is distributed, communication is achieved through local wires, and arbitration for datapath resources is unnecessary. Circuits automatically synthesized from Mediabench kernels exhibit substantially better energy-delay than aggressively clock-gated processors cores. The talk will highlight the design methodology, the target circuit architecture, and various phases of this toolflow.

Bio:

Girish Venkataramani is a ECE Ph.D. candidate at CMU. He received his B.S. from BITS, Pilani in India, and his M.S. in Computer Science from University of California Riverside. Currently, his research focuses on asynchronous circuit design and high-level synthesis. He works with the Phoenix research group and is advised by Seth Goldstein. In the past, he has investigated the integration of reconfigurable fabrics with mainstream processor cores, and optimizing compilers that target such architectures.