Simultaneous Scheduling and Allocation in High - LevelSynthesis Using A Genetic

This paper describes a genetic algorithm applied to high-level hardware synthesis, generating a register transfer level circuit from a behavioral speciication of a hardware system. High-Level synthesis consists of two combinatorial optimization problems; scheduling and allocation. It is also a multiple objective problem. Our GA solves the scheduling and allocation problems simultaneously so that it can successfully avoid falling into local minimums and cope with multiple objectives, giving diierent weight to tness functions. Several new ideas are involved in our paper. One is a straightforward method obtaining oospring eeciently using GA operations with a mechanism repairing faulty genes when creating oospring. EEcient creation is crucial to an optimization problem with severe restrictions since most oospring violate the environment. When a gene violates the environment, it is replaced by the alternative parent gene or one of the available genes in order to repair the violating gene. Another idea is to diierentiate the circuits with the same tness to the environment from the viewpoint of closeness to the assumed optimal circuit. This diierentiation can strongly avoid premature convergence, wandering around a better solution through many generations. Using these ideas, our GA has succeeded in obtaining improved solutions, compared to other high level synthesis optimization techniques,for bench mark problems.