Automatic Compilation of C Applications for FPGA-Based Hardware Acceleration

Advancement in design tools is necessary to bridge the widening productivity gap between hardware design and software development in state-of-the-art Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). We present a design exploration framework that automatically compiles C applications to realize efficient custom co-processor structures for hardware acceleration on the reconfigurable logic. We show that the proposed design exploration framework can automatically generate Register Transfer Level (RTL) codes from C-functions that outperform the commercial Altera C2H RTL generator by about 40% in terms of average area-time product.