C to Asynchronous Dataflow Circuits: An End-to-End Toolflow

We present a complete toolflow that translates ANSI-C programs into asynchronous circuits. The toolflow is built around a compiler that converts C into a functional dataflow intermediate representation, exposing instruction-level, pipeline and memory parallelism. The compiler performs optimizations and converts the intermediate representation into pipelined asynchronous circuits, with no centralized controllers. In the resulting circuits, control is distributed, communication is achieved through local wires, and arbitration for datapath resources is unnecessary. Circuits automatically synthesized from Mediabench kernels exhibit excellent energy-delay.