Implementation of Software Tools for Automated Design of Application-Specific Streaming Computers

The performance figures of general-purpose computing systems while solving complex computational problems (like real-time VR-rendering, machine learning or natural phenomena modeling) rarely satisfy the set constraints, hence application-specific hardware accelerators, namely streaming computers, are used instead. The manual design of hardware is tedious and errorprone, so automated design-tools like high-level synthesis tools have emerged. In the case of streaming computers, existing automated design frameworks are either proprietary or utilize concepts from low levels of abstraction, where it is easier to make a mistake. This paper introduces a set of open-source software tools, which allows specifying the computational logic of a streaming computer with a domain-specific language DFCxx and translating such a specification to SystemVerilog hardware description language, so that the resulting description might be used in the manufacturing flow. The tools are implemented in C++ programming language and also include the DFCIR intermediate representation, based on an LLVM MLIR-project. This paper contains: 37 pages, 3 chapters, 3 figures, 1 table, 15 sources, 11 appendixes. Keywords: heterogeneous computing systems, hardware accelerators, application-specific streaming computers, electronic design automation, intermediate representation, MLIR, CIRCT.