4 research outputs found
Towards High-Level Synthesis of Quantum Circuits
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of quantum algorithms, primarily due to their exponential speedup over their classical counterparts. Quantum algorithms find applications in various domains, including machine learning, molecular simulation, and cryptography. However, extensive knowledge of linear algebra and quantum mechanics are required to program a quantum computer, which might not be feasible for traditional software programmers. Moreover, current quantum programming paradigm is difficult to scale and integrate quantum circuits to achieve complex functionality. To this end, in this paper, we introduce QHLS, a quantum high-level synthesis (HLS) framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first HLS framework for quantum circuits. The proposed QHLS allows quantum programmers to start with high-level behavioral descriptions (e.g., C, C++) and automatically generate the corresponding quantum circuit; thus, reducing the complexity of programming a quantum computer. Our experimental results demonstrate the success of QHLS in translating high-level behavioral software programs containing arithmetic, logical, and conditional statements
Pushing the Limits of Machine Design: Automated CPU Design with AI
Design activity -- constructing an artifact description satisfying given
goals and constraints -- distinguishes humanity from other animals and
traditional machines, and endowing machines with design abilities at the human
level or beyond has been a long-term pursuit. Though machines have already
demonstrated their abilities in designing new materials, proteins, and computer
programs with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, the search
space for designing such objects is relatively small, and thus, "Can machines
design like humans?" remains an open question. To explore the boundary of
machine design, here we present a new AI approach to automatically design a
central processing unit (CPU), the brain of a computer, and one of the world's
most intricate devices humanity have ever designed. This approach generates the
circuit logic, which is represented by a graph structure called Binary
Speculation Diagram (BSD), of the CPU design from only external input-output
observations instead of formal program code. During the generation of BSD,
Monte Carlo-based expansion and the distance of Boolean functions are used to
guarantee accuracy and efficiency, respectively. By efficiently exploring a
search space of unprecedented size 10^{10^{540}}, which is the largest one of
all machine-designed objects to our best knowledge, and thus pushing the limits
of machine design, our approach generates an industrial-scale RISC-V CPU within
only 5 hours. The taped-out CPU successfully runs the Linux operating system
and performs comparably against the human-designed Intel 80486SX CPU. In
addition to learning the world's first CPU only from input-output observations,
which may reform the semiconductor industry by significantly reducing the
design cycle, our approach even autonomously discovers human knowledge of the
von Neumann architecture.Comment: 28 page
Mutual Impact between Clock Gating and High Level Synthesis in Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators
With the diffusion of cyber-physical systems and internet of things, adaptivity and low power consumption became of primary importance in digital systems design. Reconfigurable heterogeneous platforms seem to be one of the most suitable choices to cope with such challenging context. However, their development and power optimization are not trivial, especially considering hardware acceleration components. On the one hand high level synthesis could simplify the design of such kind of systems, but on the other hand it can limit the positive effects of the adopted power saving techniques. In this work, the mutual impact of different high level synthesis tools and the application of the well known clock gating strategy in the development of reconfigurable accelerators is studied. The aim is to optimize a clock gating application according to the chosen high level synthesis engine and target technology (Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)). Different levels of application of clock gating are evaluated, including a novel multi level solution. Besides assessing the benefits and drawbacks of the clock gating application at different levels, hints for future design automation of low power reconfigurable accelerators through high level synthesis are also derived