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This paper introduces a high-level synthesis (HLS) tool that integrates fine-grained pipeline control within a sequential programming model, addressing the limitations of existing tools that either lack control or compromise sequential semantics. By employing a novel programming abstraction called visibility control, the tool effectively unifies various hazard resolution strategies, enabling efficient design-space exploration. Evaluations on in-order RISC-V cores and other applications demonstrate that the compiled pipelines not only outperform traditional HLS tools but also achieve power, performance, and area (PPA) metrics comparable to hand-written register-transfer level (RTL) designs.
Compiled pipelines using a novel visibility control abstraction outperform traditional HLS tools while matching the efficiency of hand-written RTL designs.
High-level synthesis (HLS) raises the abstraction of hardware design from concurrent register-transfer level (RTL) programs to sequential programs. Among the forms of parallelism HLS exploits, pipelining demands fine-grained control over pipeline structure and hazard resolution to achieve competitive power, performance, and area (PPA). However, existing tools either lack such control or sacrifice sequential semantics to provide it. We present an HLS tool that embeds fine-grained pipeline control in a sequential programming model, enabling rapid design-space exploration. The tool builds on visibility control, a novel programming abstraction that unifies hazard resolution strategies including stalling, bypassing, speculation, deferred commit, and register renaming. We evaluate on in-order RISC-V cores, histograms, and an AES accelerator. On RISC-V cores, we implement stall, bypass, speculation, and register renaming; on histograms, we implement scheduling strategies that previously required RTL or concurrent programming models. Compiled pipelines outperform HLS tools with sequential semantics and achieve PPA comparable to hand-written RTL.
