Cash - A Single-Source Hardware-Software Codesign Framework for Rapid Prototyping.

With Moore's Law coming to an end, hardware specialization and systems on chips are providing new opportunities for continuing performance scaling while reducing the energy cost of computation. However, the current hardware design methodologies require significant engineering efforts and domain expertise, making the design process unscalable. More importantly, hardware specialization presents a unique challenge for a much tighter software and hardware co-design environment to exploit domain-specific optimizations and design efficiency. In this work, we introduce Cash, a single-source hardware-software co-design framework for rapid SoC prototyping and accelerators research. Cash leverages the unique efficiency and generative attributes of Modern C++ to provide a unified development environment, aiming at closing the architecture research methodology gap. The Cash framework introduces new co-design programming abstractions that enable seamless integration with existing software from architecture research simulators to high-level synthesis.