Retiming for wire pipelining in system-on-chip

At the integration scale of system-on-chips (SOCs), the conflicts between communication and computation will become prominent even on a chip. A big fraction of system time will shift from computation to communication. In synchronous systems, a large amount of communication time is spent on multiple-clock period wires. In this paper, we explore retiming to pipeline long interconnect wires in SOC designs. Behaviorally, it means that both computation and communication are rescheduled for parallelism. The retiming is applied to a netlist of macroblocks, where the internal structures may not be changed and flip-flops may not be able to be inserted on some wire segments. This problem is different from that on a gate-level netlist and is formulated as a wire-retiming problem. Theoretical treatment and a polynomial time algorithm are presented in the paper. Experimental results showed the benefits and effectiveness of our approach.