Specialization Vs. Generalization In Processors


Academia has been looking at specialization for many years, but solutions were rejected because general-purpose solutions were advancing fast enough to keep up with most application requirements. That is no longer the case. The introduction and support of the RISC-V processor architecture has attracted a lot of attention, but whether that is the right direction for the majority of modern comput... » read more

A Full-Stack Domain-Specific Overlay Generation Framework Verified On FPGA


A new technical paper titled "OverGen: Improving FPGA Usability through Domain-specific Overlay Generation" by researchers at UCLA and Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Our essential idea is to develop a hardware generation framework targeting a highly-customizable overlay, so that the abstraction gap can be lowered by tuning the design instance to applications of interest. We leverage and ext... » read more

SARA: Scaling a Reconfigurable Dataflow Accelerator


Yaqi Zhang, Nathan Zhang, Tian Zhao, Matt Vilim, Muhammad Shahbaz, Kunle Olukotun (Stanford) Abstract—"The need for speed in modern data-intensive workloads and the rise of “dark silicon” in the semiconductor industry are pushing for larger, faster, and more energy and areaefficient architectures, such as Reconfigurable Dataflow Accelerators (RDAs). Nevertheless, challenges remain in d... » read more