Invited: A Distributed Approach to Silicon Compilation

Abstract

Hardware specialization for the long tail of future energy constrained edge applications will require reducing design costs by orders of magnitude. In this work, we take a distributed approach to hardware compilation, with the goal of creating infrastructure that scales to thousands of developers and millions of servers. Technical contributions in this work include (i) a standardized hardware build system manifest, (ii) a light-weight flowgraph based programming model, (iii) a client/server execution model, and (iv) a provenance tracking system for distributed development. These ideas have been reduced to practice in SiliconCompiler, an open source build system that demonstrates an order of magnitude compilation speed up on multiple designs and PDKs compared to single threaded build systems.