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Agile Hardware Project

Concept WIKI v1 · 6/8/2026

A Stanford-based research project whose primary goal is to facilitate rapid design space exploration for coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs). The challenges encountered while building compilers for its rapidly evolving target architecture motivated the development of automated methods for synthesizing instruction selection rewrite rules from RTL.

Overview

The Agile Hardware Project is a research effort based at Stanford University focused on enabling rapid architectural design space exploration. According to the FMCAD 2022 paper Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT, the project's primary goal is to facilitate rapid design space exploration for a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA).

Motivation and Compiler Challenges

The project centers on exploring CGRA architectures, which are rapidly evolving during the design process. The authors of the FMCAD 2022 paper report that, in the course of the project, manually maintaining rewrite rules for a rapidly changing architecture was a constant pain point. Because compiler rewrite rules encode how to translate the compiler's intermediate representation (IR) into the target instruction set architecture (ISA), and because ISA documentation and rewrite rules must be carefully maintained by hand, this manual work became a bottleneck for iterating on new architectural designs.

Impact on Tooling

The compiler-construction difficulties encountered in the Agile Hardware Project directly motivated the development of a method for automatically synthesizing instruction selection rewrite rules from a register-transfer level (RTL) description of the target architecture, together with a description of architectural state and the instruction format, using SMT solvers. According to the paper, this method has made possible the efficient and algorithmic exploration of large design spaces, because the generation of the rewrite rules can be performed efficiently without a human in the loop. The same automated synthesis technique has subsequently been applied beyond CGRAs, including to integer and floating-point rewrite rules from an IR to various reconfigurable array architectures, and from WebAssembly to RISC-V (with both standard and custom extensions).

Affiliation and Context

The Agile Hardware Project is associated with Stanford University; the FMCAD 2022 paper describing work that arose in the context of the project lists authors from Stanford, including faculty and students in computer science and electrical engineering. The project sits within the broader context of research responding to the end of Moore's law and Dennard scaling, in which future performance improvements are expected to come from domain-specific architectures and accelerators rather than from process technology gains.

Limitations of This Article

The details above are drawn solely from one cited source. The Agile Hardware Project may encompass additional goals, publications, or architectural targets beyond what is described in that single paper; those aspects are not asserted here in the absence of supporting evidence.

LINKED ENTITIES

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Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT MENTIONS

CITATIONS

5 sources
5 citations
[1] The Agile Hardware Project's primary goal is to facilitate rapid design space exploration for a coarse-grained reconfigurable array (CGRA). Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT
[2] In the Agile Hardware Project, manually maintaining rewrite rules for a rapidly changing architecture was a constant pain point, which motivated the development of an automated synthesis method. Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT
[3] The automated rewrite-rule synthesis method developed in the context of the Agile Hardware Project has made possible the efficient and algorithmic exploration of large design spaces, with rewrite rule generation performed without a human in the loop. Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT
[4] The Agile Hardware Project is associated with Stanford University; the FMCAD 2022 paper describing work that arose in the project lists authors from Stanford. Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT
[5] The Agile Hardware Project's compiler-construction challenges sit within a broader research context responding to the end of Moore's law and Dennard scaling, in which future performance gains are expected from domain-specific architectures and accelerators. Synthesizing Instruction Selection Rewrite Rules from RTL using SMT