Scalable Code Generation for RTL Simulation of Deep Learning Accelerators With MLIR
摘要
As deep learning accelerators scale in complexity, efficient Register Transfer Level (RTL) simulation becomes crucial for reducing the long runtime of hardware design and verification. However, existing RTL simulators struggle with high compilation overhead and slow simulation performance, particularly for large deep learning accelerator designs, where components are heavily reused and hierarchically structured. This inefficiency arises because existing simulators repeatedly regenerate and recompile redundant code, failing to leverage the structural parallelism inherent in deep learning accelerators. To address this challenge, we propose ScaleRTL, a scalable and unified code generation flow that automatically produces optimized parallel RTL simulation code for deep learning accelerators. Built on the MLIR infrastructure, ScaleRTL identifies repetitive design patterns, reduces code size and compilation time, and generates efficient simulation executables that exploit both CPU and GPU parallelism. Compared to state-of-the-art RTL simulators, ScaleRTL achieves a compilation speedup of three to five orders of magnitude and up to 15 \(\times \) and 300 \(\times \) simulation speedup on CPU and GPU, respectively.