Early-stage Automated Identification Tool for Shared Accelerators

The use of application-specific accelerators to improve systems’ energy-efficiency and performance is becoming more prevalent. To overcome the tight area budget on embedded systems we propose an early detection tool that complements existing High-level Synthesis tools by identifying computationally similar synthesizable kernels that are used to build Shared Accelerators (SAs). SAs are specialized hardware accelerators that execute very different software kernels but share the common hardware functions between them. SAs can provide increased coverage if similarities between the dataflow and control flow of seemingly very different workloads are detected. Existing methods use either dynamic traces or analyze register transfer level (RTL) implementations to find these similarities which requires deep knowledge of RTL and the time-consuming RTL design process.