An architecture for function pointers and non inlined function calls in high level synthesis

Modern embedded systems design increasingly couple hardware accelerators and processing units to obtain the right balance between energy efficiency and platform specialization. In this context High Level Synthesis (HLS) design flows can significantly reduce the effort needed to design these architectures. This thesis introduces a new HLS methodology that supports the synthesis of tightly coupled clusters of accelerators suitable to be used as building blocks for architecture design with the introduction of PorkSoC, a templated System on Chip (SoC) suitable for automatic generation. The proposed methodology introduces the concept of non-inlined function call and of function pointers to the traditional HLS methodology to synthesize cluster of accelerators able to call other accelerators to perform their computation without the mediation of a General Purpose Processor (GPP).