Infraestrutura de compilação para a implementação de aceleradores em FPGA

Abstract

In recent years, performance improvements in sequential microprocessors have been limited by physical and technological factors. For this reason, alternative approaches for high performance execution have gained importance. One of them is based in the use of reconfigurable hardware, implemented using FPGAs. However, conventional methods for programming those devices are notoriously complex, usually based on hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog. This work presents the development of a compilation framework to support the translation of a loop, described in C language, into its corresponding version for synthesis in reconfigurable hardware. The optimized execution is based on the loop pipelining technique, which requires advanced compiler support. That is achieved by using the Cetus compiler, enhanced by a number of modifications, and thus used as a basis for the semi-automatic generation of custom-hardware accelerators. In order to guide the compiler developments and validate its basic functionalities, two study cases were considered: one based on finite state machines as the method of choice for hardware modelling (EC-1), and another based on the LALP domain specific language. In both cases, the proposed compilation framework have shown to be a facilitator element for the development of high performance custom-hardware.