Synthesis of Custom Hardware from ADA with Artificial Intelligence Techniques

Abstract

The advancing complexity of contemporary microelectronics has motivated research in high-level and system synthesis (HLS). Formal and intelligent HLS techniques are presented in this contribution, thus the generated implementation is correct-by-construction. These intelligent techniques include RDF (Resource Description Framework) and logic relations, along with automatic implementation options and they are employed for the transformations of a hardware compiler. The proposed toolset utilizes compiler-generators, RDF rules and logic programming in combination with XML validation of the internal state of the compiler. These intelligent and formal techniques make the whole transformation from source code to implementation, formal. The HLS tool is enhanced with the Parallel, Abstract Resource -Constrained Scheduler, which aggressively optimizes the initial state schedules, into maximally parallelized ones. A number of custom options are applied by the user of this toolset, in order to automatically compile selected testcases from real-world applications which prove the usability of the embedded scheduler and the formal compilation of the intelligent HLS compiler. Synthesis of Custom Hardware from ADA with Artificial Intelligence TechniquesMichael Dossis* In [17] an actor, that is used to model every module or system process, communicates with other actors via communication channels. These actors are used by the System Co-Designer [17] to exercise electronic system level (ESL) design space exploration. In [18] the SURYA system utilises the Simplify theorem prover to prove that the RTL model generated by HLS tools is functionally-equivalent to the specification. SURYA found two bugs in the SPARK HLS tool [2], which were until then unknown. In [19] flip-flops are replaced with latches so as to improve implementation timing, since latches are inherently more tolerant to process variations than flip-flops. Nevertheless, latchbased design is more cumbersome than flip-flops. The W3C Resource Description FrameworkThe Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a metadata model and is used to model the information of web resources [7]. RDF models include subject-predicate-object relations with explicit statements, called triplets. Triplets specify resources that store knowledge, information and data retrieval in large automated software tools. This is achieved due to the suitability of RDF to capture, store, exchange, and use machine-readable web information. Here, RDF is used to formally model and validate the internal data and state of the author's HLS tool.The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) serialization format is used to define RDF. XML's syntax is formally specified [7] and is ideal to model simple triples such as subject-predicate-object (and other) relations. The following RDF relation: <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.awl.com/ Formal_Synthesis"> <dc:title>High-level Synthesis</dc:title> <dc:publi...