Cornell ECE 6775

ECE 6775

High-Level Digital Design Automation

Fall 2025

Overview

Lectures – Tuesday & Thursday 11:40am-12:55pm, Hollister 366

Instructor – Zhiru Zhang

Office hours – Thursday 5:00-6:00pm, Online

CMS – https://cmsx.cs.cornell.edu

Ed – https://edstem.org/us/courses/81323

Course Texts

Lecture slides
Ryan Kastner, Janarbek Matai, and Stephen Neuendorffer, Parallel Programming for FPGAs, arXiv, 2018.
Giovanni De Micheli, Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits, McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Course Schedule

Week 1

Tue 08/26 – Introduction

Lecture01 Slides
Readings

Course Syllabus

Thu 08/28 – Hardware Specialization 1

Lecture02 Slides
Readings

W. Dally, Y. Turakhia, S. Han. Domain-Specific Hardware Accelerators. CACM 2020.

Week 2

Tue 09/02 – Hardware Specialization 2

Lecture03 Slides
Readings

S. Williams, A. Waterman, D. Patterson. Roofline: An Insightful Visual Performance Model for Multicore Architectures. CACM 2009

Thu 09/04 – C-Based HLS

Lecture04 Slides
Readings

Vivado HLS Setup Guide
Kastner, Matai, and Neuendorffer: Ch. 1.1, 1.4, 2.1-2.4

Week 3

Tue 09/09 – FPGAs

Lecture05 Slides
Readings

Kastner, Matai, and Neuendorffer: Ch. 1.2-1.3, Ch. 3.5
A. Boutros, V. Betz. FPGA Architecture: Principles and Progression. IEEE CAS-M 2021.

Thu 09/11 – Analysis of Algorithms

Lecture06 Slides
Readings

De Micheli: Ch. 2.1-2.3

Fri 09/12 – Lab 1 Due: CORDIC Design

Assignment
Readings

Kastner, Matai, and Neuendorffer: Ch. 3.1-3.3
Xilinx, Inc. Vivado Design Suite User Guide: High-Level Synthesis. Ch. 4: pages 388-390, 555-577
(regarding the usage of Vivado HLS Tcl directives and ap_fixed).
Schaumont: A Practical Introduction to Hardware/Software Codesign, Ch. 15 CORDIC Co-processor.

Week 4

Tue 09/16 – Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs)

Lecture07 Slides
Readings

De Micheli: Ch. 2.5.1 & 2.5.2
K. Brace, R. Rudell, and R. Bryant, Efficient Implementation of a BDD Package. Design Automation Conf., 1991.

Thu 09/18 – Control Flow Graph

Lecture Slides
Readings

F. E. Allen. Control Flow Analysis. Symp. on Compiler Optimization. 1970.

Fri 09/19 – HW 1 Due

Week 5

Tue 09/23 – Static Single Assignment

Lecture Slides
Readings

R. Cytron, et al. An Efficient Method of Computing Static Single Assignment Form. ACM Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, 1989.

Thu 09/25 – Scheduling 1

Lecture Slides
Readings

De Micheli: Ch. 2.3.4, 5.1–5.4.1
C.-T. Hwang, J.-H. Lee, Y.-C. Hsu. A Formal Approach to the Scheduling Problem in High Level Synthesis. IEEE TCAD, 1991.

Week 6

Mon 09/29 – Lab 2 Due

Tue 09/30 – Scheduling 2

Lecture Slides
Readings

De Micheli: 5.4.2 & 5.4.3
J. Cong and Z. Zhang. An Efficient and Versatile Scheduling Algorithm Based on SDC Formulation. Design Automation Conf., 2006.
S. Dai, G. Liu, and Z. Zhang. A Scalable Approach to Exact Resource-Constrained Scheduling Based on a Joint SDC and SAT Formulation. Int'l Symp. on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, 2018.

Thu 10/02 – Neural Network Tutorial

Lecture Slides
Readings

L. Fei-Fei, J. Johnson, and S. Yeung. Stanford CS231n Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition.

Week 7

Tue 10/07 – Pipelining 1

Lecture Slides
Readings

B. R. Rau. Iterative Module Scheduling: An Algorithm for Software Pipelining Loops. Int'l International Symp. on Microarchitecture, 1994.
Z. Zhang and B. Liu. SDC-Based Modulo Scheduling for Pipeline Synthesis. Int'l Conf. on Computer-Aided Design, 2013.

Thu 10/09 – Pipelining 2, Resource Sharing

Lecture Slides
Readings

De Micheli: Ch. 4.3, 6.7

Fri 10/10 – Lab 3 Due

Week 8

Tue 10/14 – Fall Break

Thu 10/16 – Domain-Specific Programming

Lecture Slides
Readings

H. Chen, N. Zhang, S. Xiang, Z. Zeng, M. Dai, and Z. Zhang. Allo: A Programming Model for Composable Accelerator Design. ACM SIGPLAN Conf. on Programming Language Design and Implementation, 2024.

Fri 10/17 – HW 2 Due

Week 9

Tue 10/21 – Deep Learning Acceleration on FPGAs

Lecture Slides
Readings

C. Zhang, P. Li, G. Sun, Y. Guan, B. Xiao, and J. Cong. Optimizing FPGA-Based Accelerator Design for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Int'l Symp. on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, 2015.
H. Chen, J. Zhang, Y. Du, S. Xiang, Z. Yue, N. Zhang, Y. Cai, and Z. Zhang. Understanding the Potential of FPGA-Based Spatial Acceleration for Large Language Model Inference. ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, 2024.

Thu 10/23 – Midterm Review & HLS Design Practice

Lecture Slides

Week 10

Tue 10/28 – In-Class Prelim

Open Book, Open Notes

Thu 10/30 – Project Guidelines

Lecture Slides
Readings

Y.-H. Lai, E. Ustun, S. Xiang, Z. Fang, H. Rong, and Z. Zhang. Programming and Synthesis for Software-Defined FPGA Acceleration: Status and Future Prospects. ACM Trans. on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, 2021.

Week 11

Tue 11/04 – Project Meetings

Wed 11/06 – Lab 4 Due

Thu 11/06 – Project Meetings

Fri 11/07 – Project Abstract Due

Week 12

Tue 11/11 – Project Meetings

Thu 11/13 – Project Meetings

Week 13

Tue 11/18 – Project Meetings

Thu 11/20 – Project Meetings

Week 14

Tue 11/25 – Project Meetings

Thu 11/27 – Thanksgiving

Week 15

Tue 12/02 – Project Meetings

Thu 12/04 – Project Meetings

Week 16

Tue 12/09 – Project Presentation

Fri 12/12 – Project Report Due