Lin-Analyzer: A High-level Performance Analysis Tool for FPGA-based Accelerators

The increasing complexity of FPGA-based accelerators, coupled with time-to-market pressure, makes high-level synthesis (HLS) an attractive solution to improve designer productivity by abstracting the programming effort above register-transfer level (RTL). HLS offers various architectural design options with different trade-offs via pragmas (loop unrolling, loop pipelining, array partitioning). However, non-negligible HLS runtime renders manual or automated HLS-based exhaustive architectural exploration practically infeasible. To address this challenge, we present Lin-Analyzer, a high-level accurate performance analysis tool that enables rapid design space exploration with various pragmas for FPGA-based accelerators without requiring RTL implementations.