hlslib: Software Engineering for Hardware Design

Understand

High-level synthesis (HLS) tools have brought FPGA development into the mainstream, by allowing programmers to design architectures using familiar languages such as C, C++, and OpenCL.

• While the move to these languages has brought significant benefits, many aspects of traditional software engineering are still unsupported, or not exploited by developers in practice.
• Furthermore, designing reconfigurable architectures requires support for hardware constructs, such as FIFOs and shift registers, that are not native to CPU-oriented languages.
• To address this gap, we have developed hlslib, a collection of software tools, plug-in hardware modules, and code samples, designed to enhance the productivity of HLS developers.