Efficient System-Level Hardware Synthesis of Dataflow Programs Using Shared Memory Based FIFO

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to raise the level of abstraction in the design of embedded systems to the system-level. A novel design flow was proposed that enables an efficient hardware implementation of video processing applications described using a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for dataflow programming. Despite the huge advancements in High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), designers are still required to have detailed knowledge about coding techniques and the targeted architecture to achieve efficient solutions. Moreover, the main downside of the High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools is the lack of the entire system consideration. As a remedy, in this work, we propose a design flow that combines a dataflow compiler for generating C-based High-Level Synthesis (HLS) descriptions from a dataflow description and a C-to-gate synthesizer for generating Register Transfer Level (RTL) descriptions. The challenge of implementing the communication channels of dataflow programs relying on Model of Computations (MoC) in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is the minimization of the communication overhead. In this issue, we introduced a new interface synthesis approach that maps the large amounts of data that multimedia and image processing applications process, to shared memories on the Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). This leads to a tremendous decrease in the latency and an increase in the throughput. These results were demonstrated upon the hardware synthesis of the emerging High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Simulation results showed that the proposed implementation has increased throughput by a 5.2x speedup and reduced latency by a 3.8x speedup compared to a state-of-the-art implementation.