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Validating High-level Synthesis |
The growing design-productivity gap has made designers shift toward using high-level languages like C, C++ and Java to do system-level design. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is the process of generating Register Transfer Level (RTL) design from these initial high-level programs. Unfortunately, this translation process itself can be buggy, which can create a mismatch between what a designer intends and what is actually implemented in the circuit.
The general goal of this project is to provide strong guarantees about the HLS process. As a starting point, we are exploring the idea of performing translation validation for HLS, which consists of showing, for each translation that the HLS tool performs, that the output program produced by the tool has the same behavior as the original program. Although this approach does not guarantee that the HLS tool is bug free, it does guarantee that any errors in translation will be caught when the tool runs, preventing such errors from propagating any further in the hardware fabrication process.