Proteus: An architectural synthesis tool based on the stream programming paradigm

The problem of automatically generating hardware modules from a high level representation of an application has been at the forefront of EDA research in the last few years. Such an EDA methodology would potentially enable the large pool of software engineers and algorithm IP experts without architectural and hardware expertise to design and implement platform systems, thus dramatically reducing time to market. This paper makes the argument that such a methodology requires a programming model beyond the sequential semantics of languages like C/C++. We argue in favor of the streaming programming model in which computation and data communication are explicitly separated and optimized. Our architectural synthesis tool, Proteus, processes stream programs that partition the application into a series of streaming kernels that operate on streams of data elements. Proteus produces efficient hardware accelerators that provide orders of magnitude higher throughput than a software implementation, at an area cost very close to manual HDL implementation.