FPGA HLS Today: Successes, Challenges, and Opportunities

The year 2011 marked an important transition for FPGA high-level synthesis (HLS), as it went from prototyping to deployment. A decade later, in this article, we assess the progress of the deployment of HLS technology and highlight the successes in several application domains, including deep learning, video transcoding, graph processing, and genome sequencing. We also discuss the challenges faced by today's HIS technology and the opportunities for further research and development, especially in the areas of achieving high clock frequency, coping with complex pragmas and system integration, legacy code transformation, building on open source HIS infrastructures, supporting domain-specific languages, and standardization. It is our hope that this article will inspire more research on FPGA HIS and bring it to a new height.

Automated summary

The article evaluates the success of FPGA high-level synthesis technology in various application domains and discusses the challenges faced by the current technology and future research directions.