Search

This paper presents the open-source high-level synthesis (HLS) research framework Bambu. Bambu provides a research environment to experiment with new ideas across HLS, high-level verification and debugging, FPGA/ASIC design, design flow space exploration, and parallel hardware accelerator design. The tool accepts as input standard C/C++ specifications and compiler intermediate representations (IRs) coming from the well-known Clang/LLVM and GCC compilers. The broad spectrum and flexibility of input formats allow the electronic design automation (EDA) research community to explore and integrate new transformations and optimizations. The easily extendable modular framework already includes many optimizations and HLS benchmarks used to evaluate the QoR of the tool against existing approaches [1]. The integration with synthesis and verification backends (commercial and open-source) allows researchers to quickly test any new finding and easily obtain performance and resource usage metrics for a given application. Different FPGA devices are supported from several different vendors: AMD/Xilinx, Intel/Altera, Lattice Semiconductor, and NanoXplore. Finally, integration with the OpenRoad open-source end-to-end silicon compiler perfectly fits with the recent push towards open-source EDA.

The expected massive adoption of indoor Access Points requires specific solutions to meet requirements for eco-sustainability regarding consumed power and radio interferences. Since Access Points are unused the main part of the day, application of a sleep mode mechanism is a promising approach. However, its implementation represents a radical change in mobile networking paradigm and requires innovative mechanisms to wake up the Access Points and thus rapidly restore the connectivity. Our approach uses an auxiliary low-power radio to carry out-of-band control information to maintain connectivity and wake up the Access Points when necessary. The paper details the software and hardware architecture as well as the prototyping results on Wi-Fi technology.

The expected massive adoption of home femto base stations will increase the overall power consumption, requiring eco-designed sleep modes. Whenever there are no user under the coverage of a home femto base station (at night for example), keeping it on can be seen as a waste of power, excessive interferences and lack of security. This paper proposes a method to switch-off the femto base station radio emission and wake it up when necessary. Our approach uses a second low-power channel that carries out-of-band control information to maintain connectivity. The paper will provide the software and hardware architecture and performance results of a Wi-Fi demonstrator.