News

 In the 28th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC'15) held at the Lakeview Hotel on September 9, 2015, Professor Jason Cong was invited to give an opening keynote speech entitled "High-Level Synthesis and Beyond – from Datacenters to IoTs".

Title: High-Level Synthesis and Beyond – from Datacenters to IoTs 

Abstract: In SOCC'2006, my group presented an invited paper on xPilot – the high-level synthesis (HLS) tool developed at UCLA for automatic synthesis of behavior-level C/C++ specifications into highly optimized RTL code. In the same year, The startup company AutoESL was formed to commercialize our research on HLS – an effort that many EDA companies tried but failed for over two decades. Nevertheless, the AutoESL tool (renamed to Vivado HLS after Xilinx acquisition in 2011) becomes probably the most successful and most widely used HLS tool in the history, with over tens of thousands of users from over 3,000 companies and universities worldwide (as of Feb. 2015). In this talk, I shall first share the lessons that we learned from our HLS project. Then, I shall discuss the new opportunities enabled by a robust HLS technology, from data centers to IoTs. At one end, the HLS technology can be an important building block to enable customized computing in data centers, leading to significant improvement of performance-energy efficiency. At the other extreme, HLS can enable rapid design of highly customized IoT nodes for vastly different applications, enabling best possible optimization in cost and energy efficiency. To embrace such opportunities, our recent research focuses on (i) source-code level transformation and optimization for efficient accelerator designs, such as polyhedral-based data reuse optimization and code generation, uniform and non-uniform memory partitioning, and simultaneous computation and communication optimization; (ii) datacenter-level runtime management for transparent and efficientaccelerator utilization; and (iii) cost-efficient synthesis of complex SoCs that integrates heterogeneous components, including digital and analog processing units and various sensing and communication devices. I shall highlight some key progresses in these directions.

Click here to download slides of the talk (from Prof. Cong's personal website).

About SOCC'15: In its 27 years of history, the IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC) has been the premier forum for sharing advances in system-on-chip (SoC) technologies, designs, tools, test, verification and applications. Held at changing locations in the USA, Europe and Asia, SOCC is attracting researchers and engineers from all over the world to exchange knowledge, share experiences and establish collaborations with colleagues.

This year SOCC will be held in Beijing, China and we gratefully thank our local organization team from Tsinghua University for their kind support. China is one of the fastest growing regions for microelectronics in the world and we are proud to be able to hold the conference right in the heart of this region, where thousands of years old tradition meets modern technology.

SOCC'15 website: www.ieee-socc.org/