Integrating Quick Resource Estimators in Hardware Construction Framework for Design Space Exploration

Hardware design processes often come with time-consuming iteration loops, as feedbacks generally result of long synthesis runs. It is even more true when multiple different implementations need to be compared to perform Design Space Exploration (DSE). In order to accelerate such flows and increase agility of developers — closing the gap with software development methodologies — we propose to use quick feedback generating transforms based on RTL circuit analysis for quicker convergence of exploration. We also introduce an Hardware Construction Language (HCL) based methodology to build explorable circuit generators, and demonstrate such usage over a General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) Chisel implementation. We demonstrates that using RTL estimation early in the exploration process results in ×7 less synthesis runs and ×4.1 faster convergence than an exhaustive synthesis process, and still achieves state of the art performances when targetting a Xilinx VC709 FPGA.