A Unified Memory Dependency Framework for Speculative High-Level Synthesis

Heterogeneous hardware platforms that leverage applicationspecific hardware accelerators are becoming increasingly popular as the demand for high-performance compute intensive applications rises. The design of such high-performance hardware accelerators is a complex task. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) promises to ease this process by synthesizing hardware from a high-level algorithmic description. Recent works have demonstrated that speculative execution can be inferred from the latter by leveraging compilation transformation and analysis techniques in HLS flows. However, existing work on speculative HLS lacks support for the intricate memory interactions in data-processing applications. In this paper, we introduce a unified memory speculation framework, which allows aggressive scheduling and highthroughput accelerator synthesis in the presence of complex memory dependencies. We show that our technique can generate high-throughput designs for various applications and describe a complete implementation inside an existing speculative HLS toolchain.