Application-Specific Arithmetic Design
Florent de Dinechin
INSA-Lyon, FR
ABSTRACT
General-purpose processor manufacturers face the difficult task of deciding the best arithmetic systems to commit to silicon. An alternative, particularly relevant to FPGA computing and ASIC design, is to keep this choice as open as possible, designing tools that enable different arithmetic system to be mixed and matched in an application-specific way. To achieve this, a productive paradigm has emerged from the FloPoCo project: open-ended generation of over-parameterized operators that compute just right thanks to last-bit accuracy at all levels. This work reviews this paradigm, and also reviews some of the arithmetic tools recently developed for this purpose: the generic bit-heap framework of FloPoCo, and the integration of arithmetic optimization inside HLS tools in the Marto project.
