Enabling Hardware/Software Co-design in High-level Synthesis

A hardware implementation can bring orders of magnitude improvements in performance and energy consumption over a software implementation. Hardware design, however, can be extremely difficult. High-level synthesis, the process of compiling software to hardware, promises to make hardware design easier. However, compiling an entire software program to hardware can be inefficient. This thesis proposes hardware/software co-design, where computationally intensive functions are accelerated by hardware, while remaining program segments execute in software. The work in this thesis builds a framework where user-designated software functions are automatically compiled to hardware accelerators, which can execute serially or in parallel to work in tandem with a processor. To support multiple parallel accelerators, new multi-ported cache designs are presented. These caches provide low-latency high-bandwidth data to further improve the performance of accelerators. An extensive range of cache architectures are explored, and results show that certain cache architectures significantly outperform others in a processor/accelerator system.MAS