HiPR: High-level Partial Reconfiguration for Fast Incremental FPGA Compilation

Abstract

Partial Reconfiguration (PR) is a key technique in the design of modern FPGAs. However, current PR tools heavily rely on the developers to manually conduct PR module definition, floorplanning, and flow control at a low level. The existing PR tools do not consider High-Level-Synthesis languages either, which is of great interest to software developers. We propose HiPR, an open-source framework, to bridge the gap between HLS and PR. HiPR allows the developer to define partially reconfigurable C/C++ functions instead of Verilog modules, which benefits the FPGA incremental compilation and automates the flow from C/C++ to bitstreams. By mapping Rosetta HLS benchmarks, the incremental compilation can be accelerated by 3–10× compared with Xilinx Vitis normal flow without performance loss.