Abstract:

For application domains with a range of different deployment scenarios, such as robotics, it can be advantageous to parameterize accelerator designs so that they can be easily re-designed and customized per-deployment. Previous work prescribed a systematic methodology to parameterize a class of robotics accelerators according to the physical features of the robot, and manually implemented an accelerator for robot rigid body dynamics gradients for a manipulator arm. However, to automate the process of accelerator re-deployment for future work, it has been necessary to elaborate on the tool infrastructure to create a fully parameterized flow. Without delving into the details of our particular architectural framework, this case study informally provides a retrospective of some of the challenges with tools and software that we have encountered while parameterizing our domain-specific accelerator design.