TILT: A multithreaded VLIW soft processor family

We propose TILT, an FPGA-based compute engine designed to highly-utilize multiple, varied, and deeply-pipelined functional units by leveraging thread-level parallelism and static compiler analysis and scheduling. For this work we focus on deeply-pipelined floating-point functional units of widely-varying latency, executing Hodgkin-Huxley neuron simulation as an example application, compiled with our LLVM-based scheduler. Targeting a Stratix IV FPGA, we explore architectural trade-offs by measuring area and throughput for designs with varying numbers of functional units, thread contexts, and memory banks.