WFAsic: A High-Performance ASIC Accelerator for DNA Sequence Alignment on a RISC-V SoC

The ever-increasing yields in genome sequence data production pose a computational challenge to current genome sequence analysis tools, jeopardizing the future of personalized medicine. Leveraging hardware accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs) to accelerate computationally-intensive algorithms like sequence alignment has become paramount. Recently, the wavefront alignment algorithm was introduced, significantly reducing the execution time to perform sequence alignment. This paper presents the first-ever ASIC accelerator of the WFA integrated into a RISC-V system-on-chip. Our designed chip greatly accelerates sequence alignment, delivering up to 1076x better performance over the CPU implementation of the WFA running on the RISC-V core of the chip.