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Adopting FPGA as an accelerator in datacenters is becoming mainstream for customized computing, but the fact that FPGAs are hard to program creates a steep learning curve for software programmers. Even with the help of high-level synthesis (HLS) , accelerator designers still have to manually perform code reconstruction and cumbersome parameter tuning to achieve optimal performance. While many learning models have been leveraged by existing work to automate the design of efficient accelerators, the unpredictability of modern HLS tools becomes a major obstacle for them to maintain high accuracy. To address this problem, we propose an automated DSE framework— AutoDSE —that leverages a bottleneck-guided coordinate optimizer to systematically find a better design point. AutoDSE detects the bottleneck of the design in each step and focuses on high-impact parameters to overcome it. The experimental results show that AutoDSE is able to identify the design point that achieves, on the geometric mean, 19.9× speedup over one CPU core for MachSuite and Rodinia benchmarks. Compared to the manually optimized HLS vision kernels in Xilinx Vitis libraries, AutoDSE can reduce their optimization pragmas by 26.38× while achieving similar performance. With less than one optimization pragma per design on average, we are making progress towards democratizing customizable computing by enabling software programmers to design efficient FPGA accelerators. 

Designs generated by high-level synthesis (HLS) tools typically achieve a lower frequency compared to manual RTL designs. In this work, we study the timing issues in a diverse set of realistic and complex FPGA HLS designs. (1) We observe that in almost all cases the frequency degradation is caused by the broadcast structures generated by the HLS compiler. (2)We classify three major types of broadcasts in HLS-generated designs, including high-fanout data signals, pipeline flow control signals and synchronization signals for concurrent modules. (3) We reveal a number of limitations of the current HLS tools that result in those broadcast-related timing issues. (4) We propose a set of effective yet easy-to-implement approaches, including broadcast-aware scheduling, synchronization pruning, and skid-buffer-based flow control. Our experimental results show that our methods can improve the maximum frequency of a set of nine representative HLS benchmarks by 53% on average. In some cases, the frequency gain is more than 100 MHz.