Towards trainable synthesis for optimized circuit deployment on FPGA

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) utilize multiple programmable elements and non-programmable blocks. After synthesizing an input Hardware Design Language (HDL) design into a circuit, optimizations are used to discover a satisfactory deployment on a target FPGA. HDLs' compound operations, such as addition, can be implemented in various ways and thus, multiple but functionally equivalent circuits can be synthesized. To leverage this, we propose a methodology that first enables configurable synthesis of compound operations. Second, it trains the system using a set of HDL files and architectures to optimize target performance objectives, such as critical path length and power. We prototyped our technique in the open source Verilog-To-Routing (VTR) tool. We subsequently produced two configuration files targeting different deployment objectives; experimental results with the VTR Verilog benchmarks revealed significant improvements.