Invited Paper: RapidWright: Unleashing the Full Power of FPGA Technology with Domain-Specific Tooling

Abstract

The era of domain-specific computing has created an environment that drives for the best performance possible from silicon and tools. Novel and unique implementation strategies for FPGAs that may have been infeasible in the past are now sought after in the search of better performance or faster compile time. The ability to optimize for domain-specific attributes in FPGA implementations is now more important than ever and both industry and research institutions need better ways to fully harness the programmable potential of FPGAs. This paper describes RapidWright, an open source framework from AMD Research and Advanced Development, and how it enables design implementation to be customized on commercial FPGA devices. RapidWright enables strategies previously infeasible or impossible to designers and provides sufficient flexibility to leverage domain-specific attributes in their applications for the highest performance, compile-time, or timing closure predictability. We demonstrate how the RapidWright framework has been a fundamental enabling factor in a variety of practical research efforts that have led up to 30% higher quality-of-result (QoR) and compile time improvements of 5× or greater across a number of applications.