A Compiler Intermediate Representation for Reconfigurable Fabrics

Abstract. Configurable computing relies on the expression of a computation as a circuit. Its main purpose is the hardware based acceleration of programs. Configurable computing has received renewed interest with the recent rapid increase in both size and speed of FPGAs. One of the major obstacles in the way of wider adoption of (re)configurable computing is the lack of high-level tools that support the efficient mapping of programs expressed in high-level languages (HLL) to reconfigurable fabrics. The major difficulty in such a mapping is the translation from a temporal execution model to a spatial execution model. An intermediate representation (IR) is the central structure around which tools such as compilers and synthesis tools are built. In this paper we propose an IR specifically designed fo