SdrLift: An Intermediate-Level Framework for Synthesis of Software-Defined Radio Accelerators
Lekhobola Tsoeunyane, Simon Lucas Winberg, Michael Raymond Inggs · 2019
In this paper, we present SdrLift, a domain-specific intermediate-level compiler framework for prototyping software-defined radio (SDR) applications on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). SdrLift facilitates development by automating synthesis of FPGA data-paths from algorithmic-level descriptions and through the integration of pre-defined Intellectual Property (IP) cores. Applications are the composition of actors which exchange data through unidirectional channels in a dataflow network. The behavior of each actor is described in an intermediate-level language that is designed around topological patterns and computational data patterns, resulting in a high-level of design abstraction. We demonstrate the capability of SdrLift by developing a representative SDR application for which SdrLift generated a synthesizable VHDL code. The results show that good performance and design flexibility can be achieved using SdrLift, while also conserving hardware resources in the subsequent implementation.