Simultaneous data transfer routing and scheduling for interconnect minimization in multicycle communication architecture

In deep submicron technology, wire delay is no longer negligible and is gradually becoming a dominant factor of system performance. Several state-of-the-art architectural synthesis flows have already adopted the distributed register architecture to cope with the increasing wire delay by allowing multicycle communication. In this paper, we formulate channel and register allocation within a refined regular distributed register architecture, named RDR-GRS, as a problem of simultaneous data transfer routing and scheduling for minimizing global interconnect resources. We also present an innovative algorithm with both spatial and temporal considerations. It features both a concentration-oriented path router gathering wire-sharable data transfers and a channel-based time scheduler resolving contentions for wires in a channel, which are in spatial and temporal domain, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly outperform existing related works.