Scala Based FPGA Design Flow (Abstract Only)

Abstract

With the rapid growth of data scale, data analysis applications start to meet the performance bottleneck, and thus requiring the aid of hardware acceleration. At the same time, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), known for their high customizability and parallel nature, have gained momentum in the past decade. However, the efficiency of development for acceleration system based on FPGAs is severely constrained by the traditional languages and tools, due to their deficiency in expressibility, extendability, limited libraries and semantic gap between software and hardware design. This paper proposes a new open-source DSL based hardware design framework called VeriScala (https://github.com/VeriScala/VeriScala) that supports highly abstracted object-oriented hardware defining, programmatical testing, and interactive on-chip debugging. By adopting DSL embedded in Scala, we introduce modern software developing concepts into hardware designing including object-oriented programming, parameterized types, type safety, test automation, etc. VeriScala enables designers to describe their hardware designs in Scala, generate Verilog code automatically and interactively debug and test hardware design in real FPGA environment. Through the evaluation on real world applications and usability test, we show that VeriScala provides a practical approach for rapid prototyping of hardware acceleration systems. (This work is supported by the National Key Research & Development Program of China 2016YFB1000500)