High-level synthesis (HLS) is increasingly popular for the design of high-performance and energy-efficient heterogeneous systems, shortening time-to-market and addressing today's system complexity. HLS allows designers to work at a higher-level of abstraction by using a software program to specify the hardware functionality. Additionally, HLS is particularly interesting for designing field-programmable gate array circuits, where hardware implementations can be easily refined and replaced in the target device. Recent years have seen much activity in the HLS research community, with a plethora of HLS tool offerings, from both industry and academia. All these tools may have different input languages, perform different internal optimizations, and produce results of different quality, even for the very same input description. Hence, it is challenging to compare their performance and understand which is the best for the hardware to be implemented. We present a comprehensive analysis of recent HLS tools, as well as overview the areas of active interest in the HLS research community. We also present a first-published methodology to evaluate different HLS tools. We use our methodology to compare one commercial and three academic tools on a common set of C benchmarks, aiming at performing an in-depth evaluation in terms of performance and the use of resources.

A Survey and Evaluation of FPGA High-Level Synthesis Tools

PILATO, CHRISTIAN;FERRANDI, FABRIZIO;
2016-01-01

Abstract

High-level synthesis (HLS) is increasingly popular for the design of high-performance and energy-efficient heterogeneous systems, shortening time-to-market and addressing today's system complexity. HLS allows designers to work at a higher-level of abstraction by using a software program to specify the hardware functionality. Additionally, HLS is particularly interesting for designing field-programmable gate array circuits, where hardware implementations can be easily refined and replaced in the target device. Recent years have seen much activity in the HLS research community, with a plethora of HLS tool offerings, from both industry and academia. All these tools may have different input languages, perform different internal optimizations, and produce results of different quality, even for the very same input description. Hence, it is challenging to compare their performance and understand which is the best for the hardware to be implemented. We present a comprehensive analysis of recent HLS tools, as well as overview the areas of active interest in the HLS research community. We also present a first-published methodology to evaluate different HLS tools. We use our methodology to compare one commercial and three academic tools on a common set of C benchmarks, aiming at performing an in-depth evaluation in terms of performance and the use of resources.
2016
Bambu; comparison; Dwarv; evaluation; field-programmable gate array (FPGA); high-level synthesis (HLS); LegUp; Survey; Software; Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design; Electrical and Electronic Engineering
File in questo prodotto:
File Dimensione Formato  
TCADHLSEVAL2016.pdf

accesso aperto

: Post-Print (DRAFT o Author’s Accepted Manuscript-AAM)
Dimensione 14.51 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
14.51 MB Adobe PDF Visualizza/Apri
tcad-2016-07368920.pdf

Accesso riservato

: Publisher’s version
Dimensione 1.89 MB
Formato Adobe PDF
1.89 MB Adobe PDF   Visualizza/Apri

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/998432
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus 406
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? 295
social impact