Scala-Based Domain-Specific Language for Creating Accelerator-Based SoCs

Nowadays, thanks to technology miniaturization and industrial standards, it is possible to create System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures featuring a combination of many components, like processor cores and specialized hardware accelerators. However, designing an SoC to accelerate an embedded application is particularly complex. After decomposing this application into tasks and assigning each of them to a processing element, the designer must create the required hardware components and integrate them into the final system. Currently, this process is not well supported by commercial tool flows and has to be manually performed. This is time consuming and error prone. This paper proposes a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) based on Scala to specify the architecture of accelerator-based SoCs. We leverage this DSL to coordinate commercial High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools in order to create the corresponding accelerators with proper standard interfaces for system-level integration.