Publication
Virtual Prototype driven Application Specific Hardware Optimization
Jan Zielasko; Rolf Drechsler
In: Forum on Specification & Design Languages (FDL). Forum on Specification & Design Languages (FDL-2023), September 13-15, Turin, Italy, 2023.
Abstract
Most hardware in the area of IoT and embedded
systems only ever runs a single application. To reduce the cost
and increase performance the hardware can be tailored to this
application. Unfortunately, identifying, designing, and evaluating
application-specific optimizations is complex and requires significant effort. However, application-specific hardware also performs
significantly better compared to using general-purpose processors.
Prior work attempts to address this problem via approaches from
the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) as well as the application level,
with RTL being effective but resource-intensive, while high-level
approaches are faster but lack accuracy.
In order to combine the advantages of high-level and lowlevel approaches we propose an open source Virtual Prototype
(VP) based workflow to automatically identify promising hardware
optimization candidates based on recurring patterns. Our results
demonstrate that a VP can be used effectively as a starting point
for application-specific hardware optimization.