A scala based framework for developing acceleration systems with FPGAs

Abstract

Abstract Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in heterogeneous computing have been attracting more and more attention. Development of acceleration systems based on FPGAs involves the cooperation of both hardware and software developers. However, although most hardware acceleration systems are motivated by software developers, software developers are difficult to participant in the system building because of the steep learning curve of the hardware concept and design tools. Moreover, due to the complexity of hardware-software integration in traditional ways, end-to-end performance is hard to evaluate before trivial engineering effort. To address these concerns, we propose an open-source Domain-Specific Language (DSL) based framework called VeriScala 1 to support hardware defining in a high-level language, programmatical testing, and rapid acceleration system deploying. By adopting DSL embedded in Scala language, we introduce modern software development concepts into hardware design and provide a familiar environment to software developers. And by building a stack of middle layers from hardware to software, we provide reduced hardware abstraction and communication interface to facilitate both software and hardware development and system deployment. Through the evaluation of some basic components and real-world demos, we show that VeriScala provides a practical approach to rapid prototyping of hardware acceleration systems.