Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

NANO2012 Program - S2S4HLS (2008-2012)

Participants : Emmanuel Casseau, Steven Derrien, Daniel Menard, Olivier Sentieys, Loic Cloatre, Amit Kumar, Antoine Morvan, Chenglong Xiao, Jean-Charles Naud.

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools start to be used for industrial designs. HLS is analogous to software compilation transposed to the hardware domain. From an algorithmic behavior of the specification, HLS tools automate the design process and generate a register transfer level RTL architecture taking account of user-specified constraints. However, design performance still depends on designer's skill to write the appropriate source code. The S2S4HLS (Source-to-Source for High-Level Synthesis) project intends to process source code transformations to guide synthesis hence leading to more efficient designs, and aims at providing a toolbox for automatic C code source-to-source transformations. The project is focused on three complementary goals to push the limits of existing HLS tools: loop transformations for performance optimization and a better resource usage, automatic floating-point to fixed-point conversion and synthesis of multi-mode architectures. S2S4HLS is organized into three sub-projects targeting these three objectives. The project is in close collaboration with ST Microelectronics and Compsys team at Inria Rhône-Alpes, within the overall INRIA-ST partnership agreement. It is financed by the Ministry of Industry in the Nano2012 program. Cairn is responsible of the project and involved in the three workpackages.