PASS: a package for automatic scheduling and sharing pipelined data paths

A system for automatic scheduling and sharing data paths has been developed. It is generic; different design styles such as pipeline, chaining, loop pipelines, etc., have been considered, and solutions of fastest possible, cheapest possible, fastest within hardware constraints, or lowest cost within time constraint could be found according to the user's request. The entire design space then could be explored with it. The scheduling algorithm is stepwise selective dealing with hardware urgency, time urgency, interconnection urgency, data urgency, and control urgency in a serial method with multiple levels of selections. The concept of the sharing algorithm is to consider the inter-influenced properties between operator-sharing and register-sharing, construct two inter-involved sharing criteria for them simultaneously, and then merge them concurrently.<<ETX>>