Abstract

We describe a high-level synthesis (HLS) tool, called LegUp, under active development at the University of Toronto. LegUp accepts a C program as input and automatically compiles the program to either: 1) a hardware circuit, or 2) a hybrid architecture comprising a processor (a soft-core MIPS or a hardened ARM) and custom hardware accelerators. Results show that LegUp produces circuits of comparable quality to commercial high-level synthesis tools. LegUp is open source and downloadable (http://legup.eecg.toronto.edu), providing a powerful platform that can be leveraged for new research on a wide range of HLS and hardware/software co-design topics. The tool has been downloaded by over 4000 groups from around the world since its initial release in March 2011. The talk will overview LegUp’s capabilities, unique features, current research underway, and productization efforts.

Speaker's Biography

Jason Anderson (http://janders.eecg.toronto.edu) is an Associate Professor with the Department of ECE, University of Toronto and holds the Jeffrey Skoll Endowed Chair in Software Engineering. From 1997-2008, he was with the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementation tools group at Xilinx, Inc., working on placement, routing, synthesis and timing tools for Xilinx chips.  Prof. Anderson has received seven awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching, four best papers awards, holds 27 U.S. patents, and has authored over 70 papers in refereed international journals and symposia. His research interests include all aspects of computer-aided design (CAD), architecture and circuits for FPGAs. Dr. Anderson was General Chair for the 2015 IEEE Int'l Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP). He is Program Co-Chair for the 2016 Int’l Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) and Program Chair for the 2017 ACM Int’l Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays.