CYNQ: Speeding Up FPGA Applications with Simplicity

FPGAs for hardware acceleration face several issues in their adoption by the emerging AI embedded software commu-nity, mainly due to the difficulty of getting started in the field. To address these issues, FPGA vendors have tried to simplify and combine workflows to make them user-friendly. This has also impacted the runtime libraries used on Linux to allow user space applications to interact with FPGA programmable logic. However, this approach can result in suboptimal results, given the added overhead in single-purpose applications in an attempt to generalise the runtime libraries. This work presents CYNQ Runtime Library, a simplistic and API-agnostic C/C++ runtime library with the ease of PYNQ and the efficiency of C++ and XRT. In comparison to most popular runtime libraries for AMD FPGAs, our work outperforms PYNQ and XRT with more than 5.34 × speedup in execution latency and more than 1.20 × in large workloads than XRT, which poses a better scenario for high-performance single-purpose applications.