StoneCutter: A Very High Level Instruction Set Design Language

ABSTRACT

As the density and capability of reconfigurable computing using FPGAs continues to increase and access to large scale ASIC integration continues to increase, research activities associated with high level synthesis flows have expanded at a similar rate. The goal of these research efforts is to reduce the time and effort required to construct and deploy application-specific architectures. However, these synthesis techniques often force users to consider the entire circuit design space in order to develop a successful implementation. This lack of design specificity often results in hardware design implementations that are difficult to program, difficult to reuse in future designs and make sub-optimal use of hardware resources.

In this work we introduce the StoneCutter instruction set design language and tool infrastructure. StoneCutter provides a familiar, C-like language construct by which to develop the implementation for individual, programmable instructions. The LLVM-based StoneCutter compiler performs individual instruction and whole-ISA optimizations in order to generate a high performance, Chisel HDL representation of the target design. Utilizing the existing Chisel tools, users can also generate C++ cycle accurate simulation models as well as Verilog representations of the target design. As a result, StoneCutter provides a very rapid design environment for development and experimentation.

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