Making domain-specific hardware synthesis tools cost-efficient

Abstract

Tools to design hardware at a high level of abstraction promise software-like productivity for hardware designs. Among them, tools like Spiral, HDL Coder, Optimus and MMAlpha target specific application domains and produce highly efficient implementations from high-level input specifications in a Domain Specific Language (DSL). But, developing similar domain-specific High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools need enormous effort, which might offset their many advantages. In this paper, we propose a novel, cost-effective approach to develop domain-specific HLS tools. We develop the HLS tool by embedding its input DSL in Scala and using Lightweight Modular Staging (LMS), a compiler framework written in Scala, to perform optimizations at different abstraction levels. For example, to optimize computation on matrices, some optimizations are more effective when the program is represented at the level of matrices while others are better applied at the level of individual matrix elements. To illustrate the proposed approach, we create an HLS flow to automatically generate efficient hardware implementations of matrix expressions described in our own high-level specification language. Although a simple example, it shows how easy it is to reuse modules across different HLS flows and to integrate our flow with existing tools like LegUp, a C-to-RTL compiler, and FloPoCo, an arithmetic core generator. The results reveal that our approach can simultaneously achieve high productivity and design quality with a very reasonable tool development effort.