Program transformation of hardware descriptions by means of ILP

A technique for application of correctness-preserving transformations to designs, described in an existing hardware description language, is presented. A program transformation technique based on integer linear programming (LP) is used to calculate automatically the structure description of the transformed design given the original designs' description and a transformation description. This technique is used for refining designs towards efficient implementations. It has been applied to the design of a systolic FIR filter and a parameterized multiplier-accumulator module used in the Cathedral-II silicon compilation system.<<ETX>>