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I’m currently a postdoc with Thomas Bourgeat in the Verification and Computer Architecture (VCA) lab at EPFL, working on marrying interactive theorem provers with hardware verification. Before that I did a PhD in the Circuits and Systems group at Imperial College London, supervised by John Wickerson.

My research focuses on formalising the process of converting high-level programming language descriptions to correct hardware that is functionally equivalent to the input. This process is called high-level synthesis (HLS), and allows software to be turned into custom accelerators automatically, which can then be placed on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). An implementation in the Coq theorem prover called Vericert can be found on Github.

I have also worked on random testing for FPGA synthesis tools. Verismith is a fuzzer that will randomly generate a Verilog design, pass it to the synthesis tool, and use an equivalence check to compare the output to the input. If these differ, the design is automatically reduced until the bug is located.

Publications

PLDI '24
Yann Herklotz and John Wickerson. Hyperblock scheduling for verified high-level synthesis. Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages, (PLDI), 2024.
DOI | artefact | pdf ]
CPP '23
Yann Herklotz, Delphine Demange, and Sandrine Blazy. Mechanised semantics for gated static single assignment. In Proc. of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN Int. Conf. on Certified Programs and Proofs (CPP), 2023.
DOI | artefact | pdf | slides ]
FCCM '22
Michalis Pardalos, Yann Herklotz, and John Wickerson. Resource sharing for verified high-level synthesis. In 30th IEEE Annual Int. Symp. on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2022. Short paper, HIPEAC 2022 Paper Award.
DOI | artefact | pdf ]
OOPSLA '21
Yann Herklotz, James D. Pollard, Nadesh Ramanathan, and John Wickerson. Formal verification of high-level synthesis. Proc. of the ACM on Programming Languages, (OOPSLA), 2021.
DOI | artefact | blog | changelog | pdf | poster | slides | video ]
FCCM '21
Yann Herklotz, Zewei Du, Nadesh Ramanathan, and John Wickerson. An empirical study of the reliability of high-level synthesis tools. In 29th IEEE Annual Int. Symp. on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM), 2021. Short paper.
DOI | artefact | pdf ]
FPGA '20
Yann Herklotz and John Wickerson. Finding and understanding bugs in FPGA synthesis tools. In ACM/SIGDA Int. Symp. on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), 2020.
DOI | artefact | blog | pdf | poster | slides ]

Other Papers and Posters

LATTE '21
Yann Herklotz and John Wickerson. High-level synthesis tools should be proven correct. In Workshop on Languages, Tools, and Techniques for Accelerator Design, 2021.
pdf | video ]
FPGA '21
Zewei Du, Yann Herklotz, Nadesh Ramanathan, and John Wickerson. Fuzzing high-level synthesis tools. In ACM/SIGDA Int. Symp. on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, 2021.
DOI | slides ]

Thesis

PhD Thesis
Yann Herklotz Grave. Formal Verification of High-Level Synthesis. PhD thesis, Imperial College London, UK, April 2024.
artefact | pdf ]
Masters Thesis
Yann Herklotz Grave. Fuzzing Verilog. Masters thesis, Imperial College London, UK, June 2019.
artefact | pdf ]

Blog

Hyperblock Scheduling for Verified High-Level Synthesis
This paper describes how we implement hyperblock scheduling in Vericert, a formally verified high-level synthesis tool in Coq.
Downloading Academic Papers Automatically
Ebib is a great bibliography manager that can be extended in various useful ways. I’ll go over my procedure of how I added automatic downloading of papers to ebib bib entries.
Introduction to Luhmann's Zettelkasten
Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is becoming increasingly popular for being a great note taking technique. However, it is often misunderstood as taking notes without any structure, whereas Luhmann actually structured his notes hierarchically, but also allowed for arbitrary links between notes.
Nix for Coq Development
Nix is a great package manager that can be used to control various complex environments easily, such as Coq development with ocaml extraction with various dependencies.
MSR PhD Workshop on Next-Generation Cloud Infrastructure
Summary of the microsoft talks and posters presented at the MSR PhD Workshop on Next-Generation Cloud Infrastructure.

Service

Program CommitteeLATTE'23, PERR'22
Artefact EvaluationECOOP'23, PLDI'22, CGO'22, OOPSLA'20
SubreviewerPOPL'24, ECOOP'23, FCCM'22, OOPSLA'21, FCCM'20

News

2024-04-19Defended my PhD thesis in front of Xavier Leroy and George Constantinides.
2024-02-13Submitted my PhD thesis.
2024-01-14Attended POPL'24 in London.
2023-12-01Started as a postdoc with Thomas Bourgeat in the VCA lab.
2023-01-16Presented our CPP'23 paper in Boston.
2022-12-19Internship at Amazon in the Prime Video Automated Reasoning Group.
2022-10-31Present verified GSA semantics at CAS Group.
2022-08-12Talk at the Concurrency Meeting 2022 about Formalising Predicated Execution.
2022-06-28Program Committee for PERR'22.
2022-06-17Presented the OOPSLA'21 paper at PLDI'22.
more...