STAR: An automatic data path allocator

The STAR package consists of three phases-preprocessing, data path construction (DPC), and data path refinement (DPR). The data structures are created and the lower limit of each area-dominant resource is determined in the preprocessing phase. In the DPC phase, the allocation is vertically divided into three subtasks: data transfer binding, operation assignment, and variable binding. Data transfers, operations and variables are grouped into clusters of manageable size, and a branch-and-bound search is performed in each cluster for each subtask. In the DPR phase, the data path is refined globally by evaluating the binding quality of each object. The contributions include: (1) a novel technique to evaluate the binding quality of an object on the basis of a sharing of hardware resources in which the object uses; (2) a method to judge the potential for upgrading a data path; and (3) an iterative improvement technique based on the idea of a relation network and state transition