Documentation

How to: integrate a third-party accelerator (e.g. NVDLA)


Tutorial guide:

Guide

What you will learn

  • Integrate a third-party accelerator in ESP
  • Design and test on FPGA SoCs that include multiple instances of a third-party accelerator
  • Case study: integration of the NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA)

What you will need


What you can read

Accelerator Integration for Open-Source SoC Design
Davide Giri, Kuan-lin Chiu, Guy Eichler, Paolo Mantovani, Luca P. Carloni
IEEE Micro (Special Issue: FPGAs in Computing), 2021

PAPER

Ariane + NVDLA: Seamless Third-Party IP Integration with ESP
Davide Giri, Kuan-lin Chiu, Guy Eichler, Paolo Mantovani, Nandhini Chandramoorthy, Luca P. Carloni
Workshop on Computer Architecture Research with RISC-V (CARRV), 2020

PAPER SLIDES VIDEO


What you can contribute

The ESP team welcomes external contributions and collaborations on a variety of topics including but not limited to:

  • Integrating a new third-party accelerator in ESP

  • Design new bus adapters for the third-party accelerator tile

  • Improve the NVDLA runtime application (e.g. work on batches of images, parallelize the work on multiple instances of NVDLA)

  • Compile NVDLA loadables for new networks

Check out our contributing guidelines.