Static Communication Analysis for Hardware Design

TL;DR

This work addresses the complexity gap between software and hardware development by enabling static analysis of inter-module communication in FPGA datapath designs. It introduces Core Chisel, a semantic foundation and an abstract interpretation framework that tracks channel readiness and validity to infer safe, over-approximated communication behavior, rather than concrete data values. The contributions include a formal Core Chisel semantics, an end-to-end static analysis pipeline with a translator and interpreter, and an implementation validated against hardware emulation on representative examples. The approach offers hardware designers a tool to identify communication bottlenecks, guide parallelism enhancements, and support optimization beyond traditional register sizing, with potential extensions to more complex architectures and automated optimization techniques.

Abstract

Hardware acceleration of algorithms is an effective method for improving performance in high-demand computational tasks. However, developing hardware designs for such acceleration fundamentally differs from software development, as it requires a deep understanding of the highly parallel nature of the hardware architecture. In this paper, we present a framework for the static analysis of communication within datapath architectures designed for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Our framework aims to enhance hardware design and optimization by providing insights into communication patterns within the architecture, which are essential for ensuring efficient data handling.