900 research outputs found
A proposed synthesis method for Application-Specific Instruction Set Processors
Due to the rapid technology advancement in integrated circuit era, the need for the high computation
performance together with increasing complexity and manufacturing costs has raised the demand for
high-performance con
fi
gurable designs; therefore, the Application-Speci
fi
c Instruction Set Processors
(ASIPs) are widely used in SoC design. The automated generation of software tools for ASIPs is a
commonly used technique, but the automated hardware model generation is less frequently applied in
terms of
fi
nal RTL implementations. Contrary to this, the
fi
nal register-transfer level models are usually
created, at least partly, manually. This paper presents a novel approach for automated hardware model
generation for ASIPs. The new solution is based on a novel abstract ASIP model and a modeling language
(Algorithmic Microarchitecture Description Language, AMDL) optimized for this architecture model. The
proposed AMDL-based pre-synthesis method is based on a set of pre-de
fi
ned VHDL implementation
schemes, which ensure the qualities of the automatically generated register-transfer level models in
terms of resource requirement and operation frequency. The design framework implementing the
algorithms required by the synthesis method is also presented
Agile SoC Development with Open ESP
ESP is an open-source research platform for heterogeneous SoC design. The
platform combines a modular tile-based architecture with a variety of
application-oriented flows for the design and optimization of accelerators. The
ESP architecture is highly scalable and strikes a balance between regularity
and specialization. The companion methodology raises the level of abstraction
to system-level design and enables an automated flow from software and hardware
development to full-system prototyping on FPGA. For application developers, ESP
offers domain-specific automated solutions to synthesize new accelerators for
their software and to map complex workloads onto the SoC architecture. For
hardware engineers, ESP offers automated solutions to integrate their
accelerator designs into the complete SoC. Conceived as a heterogeneous
integration platform and tested through years of teaching at Columbia
University, ESP supports the open-source hardware community by providing a
flexible platform for agile SoC development.Comment: Invited Paper at the 2020 International Conference On Computer Aided
Design (ICCAD) - Special Session on Opensource Tools and Platforms for Agile
Development of Specialized Architecture
Hardware acceleration for real time processing systems
This Master Thesis presents different Hardware acceleration algorithms and its benefits compared to the software implementation. The proposed algorithms are implemented on Xilinx ZYNQ-7000 series XC7Z020 SoC using High-Level-Synthesis (HLS) tool. With todays System-on-Chips from Xilinx or Intel, a process can be chosen to be implemented in the Programmable Logic or in the Processing System. In order to have a better acceleration factor, different approximate and accurate adders and multipliers were instantiated in Verilog, synthesized and simulated using Vivado and finally they were compared between each other to see if they really offer benefits or not. In the case of approximated adders, they showed very promising results for the application written in this Thesis. On the other hand, approximated multipliers exhibited worse results than the accurate ones
Towards a tighter integration of generated and custom-made hardware
Most of today's high-level synthesis tools offer a fixed set of interfaces to communicate with the outer world. A direct integration of custom IF in the datapath would often be more beneficial than an integration using such communication interfaces. If a certain interface protocol is not offered by the tool, either translation blocks (wrappers) are needed or the code should be written at a lower level. The former solution may hurt the performance, while the latter one is often impossible using an untimed high-level description.
In this paper interface protocols or sets of JP core accesses are first described at a low level as sets of operations with scheduling information (macros). During the synthesis process, corresponding function calls are mapped to these macros. This facilitates the integration of custom-made hardware and hardware generated by high-level synthesis tools
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