Events Calendar

New Solutions for High-Level Synthesis

Speaker: Deming Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Talk Title: New Solutions for High-Level Synthesis

Abstract: While technology scaling has presented many new and exciting opportunities, new design challenges have arisen due to increased density and stringent delay and power constraints for VLSI circuits. A significant problem is the growing gap between rapidly increasing silicon capacity and the design productivity that lags behind. High-level synthesis (HLS) has been touted as a solution to this problem, as it can significantly reduce the number of man hours required for a design by raising the level of design abstraction. However, existing HLS solutions have several limitations, and studies show that the design quality of HLS can be noticeably worse than that of manual RTL design. In this talk, I will present several new techniques we developed to drastically improve HLS solutions. These include design entry with parallel languages, smart design space exploration, logic/high-level co-optimization, automatic iterative improvement, and communication optimization across multiple modules, etc. Meanwhile, powerful source-to-source compilation and polyhedral model-based code analysis and transformation are used to enable effective realization of some of these techniques. For example, our code transformation and optimization using polyhedral model can enable data streaming across two communicating hardware modules through HLS, which achieved 30X execution speedup over the baseline on average. At the end of the talk, I will also briefly introduce other on-going research activities in my lab in the areas of GPU computing, nanotechnology, and computational genomics.

Biography: Deming Chen is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California at Los Angeles in 2005. His research interests include system- and high-level synthesis, compilation and programming for heterogeneous platforms, nano-systems design, GPU optimization, and bioinformatics. He is a technical committee member for a series of conferences, including FPGA, ASPDAC, ICCD, ISQED, DAC, ICCAD, DATE, ISLPED, FPL, etc. He is or has been an associated editor for TCAD, TVLSI, TODAES, TCAS-I, JCSC, and JOLPE. He is the program chair and general chair for several conferences. He received five Best Paper Awards, the NSF CAREER Award in 2008, the ACM SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2010, and IBM Faculty Award in 2014. He is a senior member of IEEE. He was involved in two startup companies. He implemented his published algorithm on CPLD technology mapping when he was a software engineer in Aplus Design Technologies, Inc. in 2001, and the software was exclusively licensed by Altera. He is one of the inventors of the xPilot high-level synthesis package developed at UCLA, which was licensed to AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc.

Host: Massoud Pedram

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Annie Yu