AHIR: A Hardware Intermediate Representation for Hardware Generation from High-level Programs

We present AHIR, an intermediate representation (IR), that acts as a transition layer between software compilation and hardware synthesis. Such a transition layer is intended to take advantage of optimisations available in the software compiler flow, and also to provide freedom to the low-level synthesiser, to explore options for application-specific implementations. Two operations become possible -- reuse of computational resources across different modules in the design, and generation of an application-specific memory subsystem for faster data accesses. AHIR presents a decoupled view of the program, in terms of control flow, data flow and memory accesses. Each module in AHIR is a triplet consisting of a control-path, datapath and a symbolic association between the two. Memory is represented only by load-store operators, while the memory subsystem is separately designed by the implementor. In the program-to-hardware flow, a module in AHIR corresponds to a function in C. A complete pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: VLSID
• Authors: Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe, Hakim Raja, Kavi Arya, Madhav P. Desai
• Keywords: Application-specific Memory Subsystem, Computer Architecture, Faster Data Accesses, Software Compiler Flow, VLSID 2007