Issues in debugging highly parallel FPGA-based applications derived from source code

Abstract — Using high-level synthesis tools to map programs written in general-purpose languages to FPGA hardware has grown in popularity and it is becoming necessary to provide comprehensive debugging tools in order to verify the correctness of the synthesized hardware. Currently, post-synthesis debugging is done at the circuit level. This paper discusses the issues, as well as some early results, of creating a source level debugger for hardware synthesized from source code. This study is meant to provide some insight into what needs to be added or built into synthesizing compilers in order to allow debug of a synthesized circuit at the source level, which will provide the programmer with a familiar view of the program being debugged. I