DynaRapid: From C to FPGA in a Few Seconds

Advancements in design automation technologies, such as high-level synthesis (HLS), have raised the input abstraction level and made the design entry process for FPGAs more friendly to software programmers. In contrast, the backend compilation process for implementing designs on FPGAs is considerably more lengthy compared to software compilation. While software code compilation may take just a few seconds, FPGA compilation times can often span from several minutes to hours due to the complexity of the underlying toolchain and the ever-growing device capacity. In this paper, we present DynaRapid, a very fast compilation tool that generates in a matter of seconds fully-legal placed-and-routed designs for commercial FPGAs. We leverage the inherently modular nature of dataflow circuits created by the HLS tool Dynamatic and combine it with the implementation manipulation capabilities provided by RapidWright. Our approach accelerates the C-to-FPGA implementation process by up to 33× with only 20% of degradation in operating frequency compared to a conventional commercial off-the-shelf implementation flow.