High level synthesis for reconfigurable datapath structures

High level synthesis techniques for the synthesis of restructurable datapaths are introduced. The techniques can be used in applications such as design for fault tolerance against permanent faults, design for yield improvement, and design of application specific programmable processors. The paper focuses on design techniques for built in self repair (BISR), which addresses the first two of these applications. The new BISR methodology consists of two approaches which exploit the design space exploration abilities of high level synthesis. The first method uses resource allocation, assignment, and scheduling, and the second uses transformations. The effectiveness of the approaches are verified on a set of benchmark examples.