Hardware design space exploration using HercuLeS HLS

Nikolaos Kavvadias, Kostas Masselos
2013 Proceedings of the 17th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics - PCI '13  
HercuLeS is an extensible high-level synthesis (HLS) environment. It removes significant human effort by automatically mapping algorithms to hardware, providing a valuable design assist to software-oriented developers. To enable accessibility and easiness of hardware design space exploration (DSE), HercuLeS overcomes limitations of known work: non-standard source languages, insufficient representations, maintenance difficulties, necessity of code templates, lack of usage paradigms and
more » ... endence. Specific aspects that are highlighted in this manuscript are: a) the innerworkings of the HercuLeS hardware compilation engine, b) manipulation of SSA (Static Single Assignment) form, c) automatic third-party IP integration, d) backend C code generation for compiled simulation, and e) an exemplary case of DSE. HercuLeS enables efficient hardware generation that can closely match the quality of results of a manuallydeveloped implementation with much reduced human effort and time requirements.
doi:10.1145/2491845.2491865 dblp:conf/pci/KavvadiasM13 fatcat:4o6s4hyztff3hmbc4p72b63rvy