SynCirc: Efficient Synthesis of Depth-Optimized Circuits from High-Level Languages

This repository contains the code for our paper. Our framework consists of 3 components:

• Yosys[3], an open-source Verilog synthesis suite
• XLS[0], an open-source High-Level Synthesis toolchain
• FRESH toolchain, our work providing a convenient development experience for programming multiplicative-depth-optimized MPC circuits

Instructions

We provide a Jupyter notebook fresh.ipynb for easy testing of our circuit compilation workflow. This notebook can be conveniently executed in Google Colab by uploading the fresh.ipynb notebook.

The Jupyter notebook uses pre-built binaries in order to speed up compilation. Information on reproducing these binaries is available in the Appendix.

You can also run the notebook in a Docker container locally:

DOCKER_IMAGE=$(docker build . -q -f Dockerfile.notebook)
docker run --rm -p 8889:8888 -v "$(pwd):/home/jovyan/work" $DOCKER_IMAGE start-notebook.py --NotebookApp.token='my-token'

Then head to http://localhost:8889. The notebook also works on Ubuntu-like host systems, but be aware that it installs various dependencies such as Yosys[5].

Detailed instructions for manual reproducing without Docker

Dependencies

XLS

XLS is built using the Bazel build system[1]. The Bazel website has instructions for installing Bazel on different systems: https://bazel.build/install/. Additionally the following packages are needed (exact names may vary in your distribution):

• A C++ compiler supporting C++17
• python3-distutils
• python3-dev
• libtinfo5
• python-is-python3

FRESH toolchain

The FRESH toolchain requires a 0.10.0 release of the Zig[2] compiler. Assuming a x86_64 Linux machine, the following commands will download and extract a Zig compiler binary. Binaries for other systems are available under https://ziglang.org/download/.

wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.10.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.10.0.tar.xz
tar xf zig-linux-x86_64-0.10.0.tar.xz

Building

XLS

After running the following command, various XLS tools will be present in the bazel-bin directory. This may take multiple hours.

cd xls
bazel build -- //xls/dslx:ir_converter_main //xls/tools:opt_main //xls/tools:codegen_main //xls/contrib/xlscc:xlscc

FRESH toolchain

The following shell command will build the FRESH toolchain. All executables will be present in the zig-out/bin directory.

zig-linux-x86_64-0.10.0/zig build

Testing

The following command will run the entire test suite included in the compiler subdirectory.

zig-linux-x86_64-0.10.0/zig build test

References

[0] https://google.github.io/xls/

[1] https://bazel.build/

[2] https://ziglang.org/

[3] https://yosyshq.net/yosys/

Appendix

Pre-built binary dependencies

As the build process of XLS[1] involves compiling LLVM and Clang from source, this process is time-consuming, even on powerful machines. For this reason, we provide pre-compiled binaries, which are downloaded by the Jupyter notebook. These binaries can be reproduced locally using Docker:

docker build . -f Dockerfile.xls

After completion, copy the binaries from the container image into your local system.