High-level synthesis (HLS) tools generate digital hardware designs from high-level programming languages (e.g., C/C++) and promise to liberate designers from low-level hardware description details. Yet, HLS tools are still acceptable only for certain classes of applications and are criticized for the difficulty of extracting the desired level of performance: generating good circuits still requires tedious code restructuring and hardware design expertise.
In this talk, Professor Lana Josipović presents a new HLS methodology that produces dynamically scheduled, dataflow circuits out of C/C++ code; the resulting circuits achieve good performance out-of-the-box and realize behaviors that are beyond the capabilities of standard HLS tools. Professor Josipović outlines mathematical models to optimize the performance and area of the resulting circuits, as well as techniques to achieve characteristics that standard HLS cannot support, such as out-of-order memory accesses and speculative execution. These contributions redefine the HLS paradigm by introducing characteristics of modern superscalar processors to hardware designs; such behaviors are key for specialized computing to be successful in new contexts and broader application domains.
Lana Josipović is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich. Prior to joining ETH Zurich in January 2022, she received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland. Her research interests include reconfigurable computing and electronic design automation, with an emphasis on high-level synthesis techniques to generate hardware designs from high-level programming languages. She developed Dynamatic, an open-source high-level synthesis tool that produces dynamically scheduled circuits from C/C++ code. She is a recipient of the EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award, Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Systems and Networking, Google Women Techmakers Scholarship, and Best Paper Award at FPGA’20.
