APS - Agile Processor Specialization
Open-Source Hardware-Software Co-Design Framework for RISC-V ISAXs
News
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2026-01-19 —
APS tutorial will be presented at ASP-DAC 2026
We will give a tutorial to cover the innovative components of our APS ecosystem! -
2025-10-26 —
APS paper presented at ICCAD 2025
Our paper on Agile Processor Specialization has been presented as an invited paper at ICCAD 2025.
What is APS?
APS (Agile Processor Specialization) is an open-source framework for agile hardware-software co-design of domain-specific processors. It provides both hardware synthesis and compiler infrastructure to facilitate the development of instruction extensions (ISAXs) for domain acceleration on RISC-V platforms.
APS is both open-source and fully integrated, enhancing productivity across all audiences in hardware design and adoption for domain-specific acceleration.
APS’s Ecosystem
APS aims to build a comprehensive ecosystem based on the MLIR infrastructure, covering the entire hardware-software co-design flow. Our ultimate vision is to only take applications in the target domain as the inputs, and automatically generate the complete solution artifacts comprising optimized ISAXs, architecture designs, hardware implementation, and software stacks without any manual intervention.
APS is an innovative practice of MLIR-based, automated hardware-software co-design.
Current Status
We are actively evolving the APS ecosystem towards our vision. We have released two versions of APS so far:
- APS (ICCAD 2025): The first public appearance of APS as a small prototype developed in Rust to showcase the idea of automated hardware-software co-design.
- APS 2.0 (Aquas): The first MLIR-integrated version of APS, which provides the complete flow around MLIR dialects for both hardware synthesis and compiler generation.
Get Started
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/pku-liang/aps.git
cd aps
# Follow the documentation for setup and usage
Visit our GitHub repository for more information, documentation, and examples.
We are holding tutorials to help new users get started with APS. See the Tutorial page for details. Stay tuned for upcoming events!