Enabling development of OpenCL applications on FPGA platforms

High-level FPGA synthesis tools aim to increase the productivity of FPGAs and to adopt them among software developers and domain experts. OpenCL is a specification introduced for parallel programming across heterogeneous platforms. In this paper, an automated compilation flow to generate customized application-specific hardware descriptions from OpenCL computation kernels is reported. The flow uses Xilinx AutoESL tool to obtain the design specification for OpenCL kernel cores. The provided architecture integrates generated cores with memory and OpenCL host application interfaces. The host program in the OpenCL application is compiled and executed to demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation towards achieving an end-to-end flow that provides abstraction of hardware at the front-end.