Automated Design Space Exploration in High-Level Physical Synthesis

Linfeng Du, Jiawei Liang, Jason Lau, Yuze Chi, Yutong Xie, Chunyou Su, Afzal Ahmad, Zifan He, Jake Ke, Jinming Ge, Jason Cong, Wei Zhang, Licheng Guo

Abstract: Implementing HLS accelerators on large-scale multi-die FPGAs presents significant challenges. To address this, researchers have proposed High-Level Physical Synthesis (HLPS), which co-optimizes high-level synthesis and physical design to improve achievable frequency. However, existing HLPS techniques suffer from unstable and inconsistent quality of results (QoRs), largely due to the vast number of parameters that need to be selected by the user in an ad-hoc way. As a result, achieving satisfactory solutions still requires substantial manual effort and expertise in low-level circuit design.We propose a robust and practical design space exploration (DSE) framework that enhances the reliability and QoRs of HLPS by automating the iterative parameter tuning process. Informed by metrics extracted from physical implementation outcomes, the framework applies tailored heuristics to refine HLPS parameters, enabling consistent and automated timing closure. In evaluations with large-scale, real-world designs implemented on representative multi-die devices, our framework achieves an average frequency of 311.06 MHz, reaching 2.42× the frequency of the AMD Vitis/Vivado toolchain (128.48 MHz) and 1.67× that of the leading academic solutions (186.21 MHz).

External IDs:dblp:conf/iccad/DuLLCXSAHKGCZG25