CFU Playground: Full-Stack Open-Source Framework for Tiny Machine Learning (tinyML) Acceleration on FPGAs

We present CFU Playground, a full-stack open-source framework that enables rapid and iterative design of machine learning (ML) accelerators for embedded ML systems. Our toolchain tightly integrates open-source software, RTL generators, and FPGA tools for synthesis, place, and route. This full-stack development framework gives engineers access to explore bespoke architectures that are customized and co-optimized for embedded ML. The rapid, deploy-profile-optimization feedback loop lets ML hardware and software developers achieve significant returns out of a relatively small investment in customization. Using CFU Playground's design loop, we show substantial speedups (55x-75x) and design space exploration between the CPU and accelerator.