Hardware Function ID

The HW_FUNCTION_ID uniquely identifies a hw design. It is set in the skeleton hardware module (hence the name). The skeleton id is 16 byte long. To ensure uniqueness the id is obtained by running blake2b on all files except for the skeleton_pkg itself. This way equal hw designs will always have an equal id, while being able to tell different designs apart.

The algorithm is basically as follows

file_digests := []
FOR file in files
    file_digests.append(hash(file))
END FOR
file_digests := sort(file_hashes)
skeleton_id := hash(file_digests)

Hw Function ID in VHDL

In VHDL we include the hardware function id as a constant from a package called skeleton_pkg.

HW accelerator meta description

We need to know a few things about a hw accelerator to be able to use it. This information should be provided through a meta file in toml format.

The fields are

title

field name	optional/required	description
meta_version	required	the version of the meta description file format
creator_version	required	version of the creator tool, taht was used to generate this hw function
hw_accelerator_version	required	the version of this specific accelerator, e.g., "0.1.2" this could change, e.g., if you overhaul your network topology
hw_fucntion_id	required	the automatically generated id
name	optional	used to identify the accelerator in a human readable way, e.g., "convnet"
description	optional	a long description that may contain additional documentation