A Verifiable High Level Data Path Synthesis Framework
Summary (3 min read)
Introduction
- Current system designs aim to pack as much capability as possible in order to meet application specific demands.
- This has brought the importance of design automation and emergence of technologies like reconfigurable computing in order to cope with the increasing complexity both algorithmically and quantitatively.
- High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools have been providing application description mapping HLL to Register Transfer Level (RTL).
- Hence, the uniqueness of their method is to apply static code analysis both to source code and RTL code.
- The generation process is explained in Section V-B. Step 2 is their proposed RTL generation process.
III. ESTIMATION MODEL OF ARITHMETIC COMPONENTS
- Shrinking time to market, short product lifetimes increase the necessity of early performance estimation of DSP algorithms during the development, prototyping cycle.
- An estimation model for their RH(+) HLS and RTL generation tool is proposed in this section.
- Firstly, datapath components are selected according to their delay and area behaviors.
- Then, behavior estimations of these components are measured with Xilinx XST tool by synthesizing them on FPGA with changing parameters of these components.
- The estimation methodology is handled in two steps; node estimation and graph estimation.
A. Selection of Arithmetic Components
- The estimation is modeled for four basic types of operators; adder, subtractor, multiplier and divider.
- The subtypes of the adders/subtractors are inspected for design space exploration.
- It has been seen that unlike ASIC, RCAs are the fastest and smallest adder in FPGAs because FPGAs have a dedicated logic for implementing RCA.
- CSLA has a slight advantage on delay over RCA for the bit sizes wider than 128 but not in area.
- The LogiCore IP Multiplier 11.1 and Divider 3.0 from Xilinx IP Core library [3] are used as multiplier and divider components.
B. Parametric Area and Latency Estimation for Nodes
- The arithmetic components are synthesized in Xilinx ISE 13.2 with different port sizes.
- For that reason, piecewise polynomial functions are applied for these components.
- Hardware behavior description (hbd) file is a file with a format that defines the area, delay and power models of arithmetic units.
- Property field describes whether this is delay, area or power model.
- The line after FunctionType describes the function in a specific format.
C. Area and Latency Estimation of the CDFG
- With node estimation, latency and area of every vertex in the CDFG is estimated.
- For the estimation of the overall performance, a complete estimation of the CDFG is necessary.
- When their estimation model is compared with [6] and [7], Model in [6] make estimations by extracting general information such as how many components are used and what the average input length does the operators have.
- In their methodology, the authors calculate the delay and area costs for every component in the datapath and calculate the area estimation by summing these values and calculate the delay estimation by finding critical path with graph processing.
- Estimation of their model is more accurate especially when the application‘s critical path is not proportional to graph size because Enzler‘s [6] model does not use critical path in calculations.
IV. RTL GENERATION
- The Dataflow graphs that are generated by the RH(+) tool are synthesized to VHDL as Golden-RTL.
- Golden RTL is the datapath circuit without any multiplexer and resource sharing.
- Golden RTLs are used for verification of design units.
- In the graph, every vertex represents an arithmetic operation and edges represent the signals between the operations.
- Generation of Golden RTL program consist of two main functions.
A. HDL Generation
- The authors generate necessary adder, subtractor, multiplier and divider VHDL files as components and connect them at the top level.
- The user can integrate an operator to the RH(+) framework by putting template and parameter files in the library.
- The parameter files and template files are used for generating the arithmetic components by the RTL generator software.
- After every necessary component is generated, these components are connected at the top level.
- Neither inputs nor the outputs will be registered .
V. FORMAL VERIFICATION OF GOLDEN RTL
- CDFG represents all the paths that might be traversed through a program during its execution.
- Each node in the CDFG represents operations or control structures.
- Each edge represents the data dependency between operations.
- Since it lies in the middle of RTL level and high-level representation, it is mostly where all the optimizations, reductions and decisions about the system is made.
- By using Computational Tree Logic (CTL) and Linear Time Logic (LTL) properties [14], bugs are detected right before converting the CDFG to RTL.
A. CDFG Structure
- Vertex and Edge data structures are defined to represent the CDFG.
- Vertex data structure holds the necessary information of operations and variables.
- They can either be registers, internal or external memory based on the architecture.
- It helps to identify dependencies between components.
- Apart from pointers to and from Vertices, only a single property is necessary: Name Name: Name of the Edge.
B. Generation of NuSMV Representation
- NuSMV [2] is a symbolic model checker developed as the reimplementation and extension of SMV [22].
- Hence, this flag is true whenever the variables are initialized or assigned and false otherwise.
- Each operation has different contribution to wordlengths.
- Based on the precedence levels and transitions in CDFG, the authors make next states assignments.
- This routine makes all the ini- tial assignments of the variables and the operators – GenerateState:.
C. Temporal Logic Properties
- The temporal properties are written either in CTL or in LTL.
- Similar properties are used for software verification in [23].
- Therefore by reducing unnecessary variables, power consumption, area and latency performances are improved.
D. Backward Process: Generation of CDFG from RTL
- The generation of CDFG from RTL and generation of NuSMV from the new CDFG enables the designer to verify the properties on the generated RTL.
- Therefore, after this process, there will be two CDFGs generated: one from the HLL and the other from the generated RTL.
- Hence, same properties are expected to yield same results.
- The authors apply static analysis on the generated RTL.
- By parsing structural mappings, signal/wire connections from RTL and querying components from RH(+) component database the authors build the second CDFG.
VI. EXPERIMENTS
- The authors use five benchmarks namely Elliptic wave filter (EW), Auto Regression (AR), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Infinite impulse response filter (IIR), Differential Equation (DE) to evaluate their framework.
- These algorithms are coded in LRH(+) and CDFGs are generated by RH(+) compiler.
- The authors compare their estimation of area and delay results with Xilinx ISE 13.2 synthesis, place and route reports.
- The benchmarks have maximum of twenty eight operations .
- By following the states in the counterexample output, one can trace the path that does not logically satisfy the properties which is to be verified.
VII. CONCLUSION
- The authors show the process of a data-path synthesis framework which produces formally verifiable RegisterTransfer-Level (RTL) logic from high level languages such as ANSI-C and LRH(+).
- Estimation of delay, area and power of Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA were realized in order to speed up the design phase.
- The authors benchmark five different applications for modelling, estimation and verification performance.
- The created RTL is verified by four different temporal logic properties for checking redundant hardware creation and wordlength related mismatches.
- It has been seen that, generation CPU run time is dependent both on the operator vertex and edge sizes of the graphs.
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References
47 citations
"A Verifiable High Level Data Path S..." refers background or methods in this paper
...Generation of Golden RTL program consist of two main functions....
[...]
...In [7], area, time, power models are given for Xilinx IP core which is integrated to FANTOM design automation tool....
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...In the graph, every vertex represents an arithmetic operation and edges represent the signals between the operations....
[...]
45 citations
"A Verifiable High Level Data Path S..." refers methods in this paper
...A method of area estimation model for LookUp-Table (LUT) based FPGAs is proposed in [5]....
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44 citations
"A Verifiable High Level Data Path S..." refers background in this paper
...There also exist off the shelf and research-level hardware model checkers at the netlist level [17], [18] and at CDFG level [19] with standard logic assertions....
[...]
40 citations
"A Verifiable High Level Data Path S..." refers background in this paper
...Model checking of high level programs have existed for some time [15], [16]....
[...]
31 citations