Tinker: Generating Custom Memory Architectures for Altera's OpenCL Compiler

Abstract

Tools for C/C++ based-hardware development have grown in popularity in recent years. However, the impact of these tools has been limited by their lack of support for integration with vendor IP, external memories, and communication peripherals. In this paper we introduce Tinker, an open-source Board Support Package generator for Altera's OpenCL Compiler. Board Support Packages define memory, communication, and IP ports for easy integration with high level synthesis cores. Tinker abstracts the low-level hardware details of hardware development when creating board support packages and greatly increases the flexibility of OpenCL development. Tinker currently generates custom memory architectures from user specifications. We use our tool to generate a variety of architectures and apply them to two application kernels.