System-level FPGA device driver with high-level synthesis support

We can exploit the standardization of communication abstractions provided by modern high-level synthesis tools like Vivado HLS, Bluespec and SCORE to provide stable system interfaces between the host and PCIe-based FPGA accelerator platforms. At a high level, our FPGA driver attempts to provide CUDA-like driver behavior, and more, to FPGA programmers. On the FPGA fabric, we develop an AXI-compliant, lightweight interface switch coupled to multiple physical interfaces (PCIe, Ethernet, DRAM) to provide programmable, portable routing capability between the host and user logic on the FPGA. On the host, we adapt the RIFFA 1.0 driver to provide enhanced communication APIs along with bitstream configuration capability allowing low-latency, high-throughput communication and safe, reliable programming of user logic on the FPGA. Our driver only consumes 21% BRAMs and 14% logic overhead on a Xilinx ML605 platform or 9% BRAMs and 8% logic overhead on a Xilinx V707 board. We are able to sustain DMA transfer throughput (to DRAM) of 1.47GB/s (74% peak) of the PCIe (x4 Gen2) bandwidth, 120.2MB/s (96%) of the Ethernet (1G) bandwidth and 5.93GB/s (92.5%) of DRAM bandwidth. © 2013 IEEE.