Run time interpretation for creating custom accelerators

Abstract

Despite the significant advancements that have been made in High Level Synthesis, the reconfigurable computing community has not yet managed to achieve a wide-spread use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) by programmers. Existing barriers that prevent programmers from using FPGAs include the need to work within vendor specific CAD tools, knowledge of hardware programming models, and the requirement to pass each design through a very time-consuming synthesis, place and route process. In this paper we present a new approach that takes these barriers out of the design flows for programmers. We move synthesis out of the programmers path and instead rely on composing pre-synthesized building blocks using a domain-specific language that supports programming patterns tailored to FPGA accelerators. Our results show that the achieved performance of run time assembling accelerators is equivalent to synthesizing a custom block of hardware using automated HLS tools.