Build Your Own Domain-specific Solutions with RapidWright
Christopher V. Lavin, Alireza S. Kaviani · 2019
As the complexity of programmable architectures increases with advances in silicon process technology, there is a growing need to extract greater productivity and performance from the tools. Due to their inherent reconfigurability, FPGAs are proving to be valuable targets for more efficient domain-specific architectures. However, FPGA implementation tools are designed for a broad set of applications. In this paper we describe RapidWright, an open source framework that enables customized implementations for Xilinx FPGAs. RapidWright enables implementation tools that can take advantage of the great potential of domain-specific attributes---leading to greater productivity and performance. The focus of this paper is to provide an introductory reference of RapidWright and its use cases so that others may be empowered to adapt their implementations to their domain-specific applications.