ElasticMiter: Formally Verified Dataflow Circuit Rewrites

Dataflow circuits have been studied for decades as a way to implement both asynchronous and synchronous designs, and, more recently, have attracted attention as the target of high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers. Yet, little is known about mechanisms to systematically transform and optimize the datapaths of the obtained circuits into functionally equivalent but simpler ones. The main challenge is that of equivalence verification: The latency-insensitive nature of dataflow circuits is incompatible with the standard notion of sequential equivalence, which prevents the direct usage of standard sequential equivalence verification strategies and hinders the development of formally verified dataflow circuit transformations in HLS. In this paper, we devise a generic framework for verifying the equivalence of latency-insensitive circuits. To showcase the practical usefulness of our verification framework, we develop a graph rewriting system that systematically transforms dataflow circuits into simpler ones. We employ our framework to verify our graph rewriting patterns and thus prove that the obtained circuits are equivalent to the original ones. Our work is the first to formally verify dataflow circuit transformations and is a foundation for building formally verified dataflow HLS compilers.