Design Automation for Streaming Systems
Ph.D. Dissertation
Eylon Caspi
Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2005
Abstract
RTL design methodologies are struggling to meet the challenges
of modern, large system design. Their reliance on manually
timed design with fully exposed device resources is laborious,
restricts reuse, and is increasingly ineffective in an era
of Moore's Law expansion and growing interconnect delay.
We propose a new hardware design methodology rooted in an abstraction
of communication timing, which provides flexibly timed module
interfaces and automatic generation of pipelined communication.
Our core approach is to replace inter-module wiring with streams,
which are FIFO buffered channels.
We develop a process network model for streaming systems (TDFPN)
and a hardware description language with built in streams (TDF).
We describe a complete synthesis methodology for mapping streaming
applications to a commercial FPGA, with automatic generation of
efficient hardware streams and module-side flow control.
We use this methodology to compile seven multimedia applications
to a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA, finding that stream support can be
relatively inexpensive. We further propose a comprehensive, system-level
optimization flow that uses information about streaming behavior
to guide automatic communication buffering, pipelining, and placement.
We discuss specialized stream support on reconfigurable,
programmable platforms, with intent to provide better results
and compile times than streaming on generic FPGAs.
We also show how streaming can support an efficient abstraction of area,
allowing an entire system to be reused with automatic performance
improvement on larger, next generation devices.
Keywords:
Streaming,
Design Reuse,
Concurrency,
Hardware Compilation,
Reconfigurable,
FPGA,
System Architecture.
Content
Links
Last updated: 12/16/05
Comments to:
eylon@cs.berkeley.edu