August 21st, 2020 Progress Report

Rendering Test Case

    I now have a working decomposed rendering test case on SymbiFlow implemented monolithically. Soon I will progress to defining the partition region architectures for this test case to implement separately. This will probably be put on the back-burner for a bit while I finish up the documentation and switch processing test case.

 Switch Processing Test Case

   The switch processing test case is a new test case I came up with this week as a simpler test case that emulates the sort of 'streaming/pipelined' test cases like rendering.  It is not actually inherently pipelined as each module could be fully combinational, but it demonstrates the consistent input and output from each partition region with arbitrary compute nodes mapped in each region.  

    The general idea is to pass the switch values into the first partition region, which produces some output based on the input and then passes onto the next partition region before finally being displayed on the LEDs.  Each partition region can then contain some module that modifies the given data or completely replaces it (for example adding 1 to the input data or blinking the output).  This way the function of the overall design can be changed on the fly by concatenating different FASM for each region to produce different results.  Static processing that would not need to be changed often could be placed in the overlay as well.

    This test is by no means a real world test case, but it matches the sorts of real world HLS based test cases I have been working on much better while keeping the logic simple.  This test will also be the basis for my example in the documentation.

 End of Summer of Code

    Monday is the last day of Summer of Code.  I will be finishing up documentation and testing next week before my final submission and evaluation.  Likely the rendering test case will not be finished and able to be open sourced quite yet, but should be soon as part of my other work.