Precision and error analysis of MATLAB applications during automated hardware synthesis for FPGAs

Abstract

We present a compiler that takes high level signal and image processing algorithms described in MATLAB and generates an optimized hardware for an FPGA with external memory. We propose a precision analysis algorithm to determine the minimum number of bits required by an integer variable and a combined precision and error analysis algorithm to infer the minimum number of bits required by a floating point variable. Our results show that on average, our algorithms generate hardware requiring a factor of 5 less FPGA resources in terms of the configurable logic blocks (CLBs) consumed as compared to the hardware generated without these optimizations. We show that our analysis results in the reduction in the size of lookup tables for functions like sin, cos, sqrt, exp etc. Our precision analysis also enables us to pack various array elements into a single memory location to reduce the number external memory accesses. We show that such a technique improves the performance of the generated hardware by an average of 35%.