Reducing Compilation Effort in Commercial FPGA Emulation Systems Using Machine Learning

This paper presents a machine learning (ML) framework to improve the use of computing resources in the FPGA compilation step of a commercial FPGA-based logic emulation flow. Our ML models enable highly accurate predictability of the final P&R design qualities, runtime, and optimal mapping parameters. We identify key compilation features that may require aggressive compilation efforts using our ML models. Experiments based on our large-scale database from an industry's emulation system show that our ML models help reduce the total number of jobs required for a given netlist by 33%. Moreover, our job scheduling algorithm based on our ML model reduces the overall time to completion of concurrent compilation runs by 24%. In addition, we propose a new method to compute “recommendations” from our ML model, in order to perform repartitioning of difficult partitions. Tested on a large-scale industry SoC design, our recommendation flow provides additional 15% compile time savings for the entire SoC.