RapidStream IR: Infrastructure for FPGA High-Level Physical Synthesis
Jason Lau, Yuanlong Xiao, Yutong Xie, Yuze Chi, Linghao Song, Shaojie Xiang, Michael Lo, Zhiru Zhang, Jason Cong, Licheng Guo · 2024
The increasing complexity of large-scale FPGA accelerators poses significant challenges in achieving high performance while maintaining design productivity. High-level synthesis (HLS) has been adopted as a solution, but the mismatch between the high-level description and the physical layout often leads to suboptimal operating frequency. Although existing proposals for high-level physical synthesis, which use coarse-grained design partitioning, floorplanning, and pipelining to improve frequency, have gained traction, they lack a framework enabling (1) pipelining of real-world designs at arbitrary hierarchical levels, (2) integration of HLS blocks, vendor IPs, and handcrafted RTL designs, (3) portability to emerging new target FPGA devices, and (4) extensibility for the easy implementation of new design optimization tools.