μIR -An intermediate representation for transforming and optimizing the microarchitecture of application accelerators
Amirali Sharifian, Reza Hojabr, Navid Rahimi, Sihao Liu, Apala Guha, Tony Nowatzki, Arrvindh Shriraman · 2019
Creating high quality application-specific accelerators requires us to make iterative changes to both algorithm behavior and microarchitecture, and this is a tedious and error-prone process. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools [5, 10] generate RTL for application accelerators from annotated software. Unfortunately, the generated RTL is challenging to change and optimize. The primary limitation of HLS is that the functionality and microarchitecture are conflated together in a single language (such as C++). Making changes to the accelerator design may require code restructuring, and microarchitecture optimizations are tied with program correctness.