Scheduling Structured Systems

The use of subsystems is fundamental to the modeling of hierarchical hardware using recurrence equations. Scheduling adds temporal information to a system and is thus a key step in the synthesis of parallel hardware from algorithms. It determines such things as the placement of pipeline registers, the latency and throughput of the circuit, and the order and rate that inputs are consumed and outputs produced. This paper will show how to extend usual dependence analysis to derive the additional dependences on the timing function needed when subsystems are used.