Software-driven Design for Domain-specific Compute

The end of Dennard scaling has created a focus on advancing domain-specific computing; we are seeing a renaissance of accelerating compute problems through specialization, with orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance and energy efficiency [1]. Domain-specific compute, with its wide proliferation of domains and narrow specialization of hardware and software, provides unique challenges in design automation not met by the methodologies matured under the model of high-volume manufacturing of competitive CPUs, GPUS, and SOCs [2]. Importantly, domain-specific compute targets smaller markets that move more rapidly so design NRE plays a much larger role. Secondly, the role of software is so much more significant that we believe a software-first approach, where software drives hardware design and the product is developed at the speed of software, is required to keep pace with domain-specific compute market requirements. This creates significant new challenges and opportunities for EDA to address the domain-specific compute design space. The forces that are driving the renaissance in domain-specific compute architectures also require a renaissance in the tools, flows, and methods to maintain this pace of innovation. This talk will present a general framework for approaching automation of domain-specific compute co-design of SW/HW and draw upon recent innovations in EDA that can help us address this challenge. The focus will be on driving software-oriented techniques, such as agile design, into hardware design [3], as well as vertically oriented domain-specific codesign automation stacks [4], and some of the gaps in EDA that currently limit these approaches.