Application-Specific Mesh-based Heterogeneous FPGA Architectures

Application-Specific Mesh-based Heterogeneous FPGA Architectures
Author: Husain Parvez
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2010-11-05
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 144197928X

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This book presents a new exploration environment for mesh-based, heterogeneous FPGA architectures. It describes state-of-the-art techniques for reducing area requirements in FPGA architectures, which also increase performance and enable reduction in power required. Coverage focuses on reduction of FPGA area by introducing heterogeneous hard-blocks (such as multipliers, adders etc) in FPGAs, and by designing application specific FPGAs. Automatic FPGA layout generation techniques are employed to decrease non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs and time-to-market of application-specific, heterogeneous FPGA architectures.

Tree-based Heterogeneous FPGA Architectures

Tree-based Heterogeneous FPGA Architectures
Author: Umer Farooq
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2012-05-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1461435943

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This book presents a new FPGA architecture known as tree-based FPGA architecture, due to its hierarchical nature. This type of architecture has been relatively unexplored despite their better performance and predictable routing behavior, as compared to mesh-based FPGA architectures. In this book, we explore and optimize the tree-based architecture and we evaluate it by comparing it to equivalent mesh-based FPGA architectures.

Designing with Xilinx® FPGAs

Designing with Xilinx® FPGAs
Author: Sanjay Churiwala
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3319424386

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This book helps readers to implement their designs on Xilinx® FPGAs. The authors demonstrate how to get the greatest impact from using the Vivado® Design Suite, which delivers a SoC-strength, IP-centric and system-centric, next generation development environment that has been built from the ground up to address the productivity bottlenecks in system-level integration and implementation. This book is a hands-on guide for both users who are new to FPGA designs, as well as those currently using the legacy Xilinx tool set (ISE) but are now moving to Vivado. Throughout the presentation, the authors focus on key concepts, major mechanisms for design entry, and methods to realize the most efficient implementation of the target design, with the least number of iterations.

Partial Reconfiguration on FPGAs

Partial Reconfiguration on FPGAs
Author: Dirk Koch
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2012-07-25
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1461412250

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This is the first book to focus on designing run-time reconfigurable systems on FPGAs, in order to gain resource and power efficiency, as well as to improve speed. Case studies in partial reconfiguration guide readers through the FPGA jungle, straight toward a working system. The discussion of partial reconfiguration is comprehensive and practical, with models introduced together with methods to implement efficiently the corresponding systems. Coverage includes concepts for partial module integration and corresponding communication architectures, floorplanning of the on-FPGA resources, physical implementation aspects starting from constraining primitive placement and routing all the way down to the bitstream required to configure the FPGA, and verification of reconfigurable systems.

FPGA Architecture

FPGA Architecture
Author: Ian Kuon
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2008
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1601981260

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Reviews the historical development of programmable logic devices, the fundamental programming technologies that the programmability is built on, and then describes the basic understandings gleaned from research on architectures. It is an invaluable reference for engineers and computer scientists.

Enabling Customized Computing in Datacenters: from Accelerator Design to System Integration

Enabling Customized Computing in Datacenters: from Accelerator Design to System Integration
Author: Peng Wei
Publisher:
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

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CPU-FPGA heterogeneous architectures are attracting ever-increasing attention in an attempt to advance computational capabilities and energy efficiency in today's datacenters. Such architectures provide programmers with the ability to reprogram the FPGAs for flexible acceleration of many workloads. However, this advantage is often overshadowed by two critical issues: 1) the poor programmability of FPGAs and 2) the severe overhead of CPU-FPGA integration. For one thing, the conventional RTL-based FPGA design practice significantly slows down the application development cycle. Although recent advances in high-level synthesis (HLS) have improved the FPGA programmability to some extent, it still leaves programmers facing the challenge of manually identifying the optimal design configuration in a tremendous design space. This challenge thus demands intimate knowledge of hardware intricacies to address and a great deal of effort even for hardware experts. For another, even with a high-quality FPGA accelerator that achieves an orders-of-magnitude performance/watt gain for a computation kernel, such an impressive gain can often be dramatically offset by the extra CPU-FPGA data communication overhead, resulting in a much reduced system-wide speedup, or even slowdown. This thesis aims to address these two issues so as to facilitate the adoption of FPGAs in datacenters. To improve the FPGA programmability, we propose a methodology that automates the heavy code reconstruction from software programs towards behavioral descriptions of high-quality FPGA designs, through well-defined architecture templates. Specifically, we propose the composable, parallel and pipeline (CPP) microarchitecture as an accelerator design template. This well-defined architecture template derives high-quality accelerator designs for a broad class of computation kernels, and substantially reduce the overall design space. Also, it enables the introduction of the CPP analytical model that quantifies the performance-resource trade-offs among different configurations of the CPP template. This in turn leads to fast design space exploration to identify the optimal CPP configuration in a reasonable time. On top of the architecture template and its analytical model, we develop the AutoAccel framework to automatically transform an input computation kernel program into the optimal CPP-based design for it. For general application developers, AutoAccel supplies a nearly push-button experience to produce an FPGA accelerator with good performance; for FPGA design experts, it greatly reduces the effort of manual design space exploration and code reconstruction; it thus substantially improves the FPGA programmability in both cases. To come up with an efficient CPU-FPGA integration methodology, we first conduct a quantitative analysis on the microarchitectures of state-of-the-art CPU-FPGA platforms, with a key focus on the effective latency and bandwidth of the CPU-FPGA data communication. The analysis results reveal three important factors that affect the efficiency of CPU-FPGA integration: 1) payload size of every data transfer, 2) the complicated, multi-stage CPU-FPGA data transfer routine, and 3) sharing of the FPGA resource among CPU threads. We then propose three techniques: batch processing, fully-pipelined data communication stack and FPGA-as-a-Service (FaaS) framework, for these three factors, respectively. Batch processing packs small inputs into a large payload; the fully-pipelined stack overlaps various data transfer stages and the compute stage; both improves the data processing throughput. The FaaS framework treats the CPU threads as clients, and the FPGA as the server, and shares the server among the clients via the canonical client-server paradigm. These three techniques form our proposed methodology for efficient CPU-FPGA integration, which is demonstrated through the JVM-FPGA integration process for the genome sequencing application.

Quantifying and Exploring the Gap Between FPGAs and ASICs

Quantifying and Exploring the Gap Between FPGAs and ASICs
Author: Ian Kuon
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-09-03
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9781489985095

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Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are pre-fabricated, programmable digital integrated circuits (ICs), provide easy access to state-of-the-art integrated circuit process technology, and in doing so, democratize this technology of our time. This book is about comparing the qualities of FPGA – their speed performance, area and power consumption, against custom-fabricated ICs, and exploring ways of mitigating their de ciencies. This work began as a question that many have asked, and few had the resources to answer – how much worse is an FPGA compared to a custom-designed chip? As we dealt with that question, we found that it was far more dif cult to answer than we anticipated, but that the results were rich basic insights on fundamental understandings of FPGA architecture. It also encouraged us to nd ways to leverage those insights to seek ways to make FPGA technology better, which is what the second half of the book is about. While the question “How much worse is an FPGA than an ASIC?” has been a constant sub-theme of all research on FPGAs, it was posed most directly, some time around May 2004, by Professor Abbas El Gamal from Stanford University to us – he was working on a 3D FPGA, and was wondering if any real measurements had been made in this kind of comparison. Shortly thereafter we took it up and tried to answer in a serious way.

Configuration Bit Stream Generation for the MT-FPGA & Architectural Enhancements for Arithmetic Implementations

Configuration Bit Stream Generation for the MT-FPGA & Architectural Enhancements for Arithmetic Implementations
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2005
Genre:
ISBN:

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Field Programmable Gate Array technology has grown to a stage where entire digital systems with their I/O interfaces can be implemented in single FPGAs. Even so, FPGAs are primarily digital devices with little inbuilt facilities for direct interaction with the analog world. The Multi-Technology FPGA goes beyond this limitation by integrating multi-technology and analog blocks with the regular FPGA fabric. To implement circuits on the MT-FPGA, an automatic configuration bit stream generation system is needed. Designing and implementing such a system has been the point of investigation for this thesis. The major goal in this exercise is to make the system as generic and architecture independent as possible, so as to retarget it to different architectures. The system takes as its input, the output files from FPGA synthesis tools and an architecture specification of the fabric. An XML based architecture specification format and an object-oriented software tool code named "XBits"has been developed. The first part of the thesis explains the specifics of the format and the internals of XBits. Results on academic benchmarks implemented using XBits are also given. As a second part of the thesis, the present MT-FPGA architecture is analyzed for its suitability for large arithmetic circuit implementations. Since the MT-FPGA presents a parallel platform for mapping circuits; signal processing applications that benefit greatly from multiple implementations of functions acting in parallel on long input data streams are of special interest to the MT-FPGA. A new architecture is proposed as a result of this study, which enhances the logic utilization of the FPGA fabric and the speed of arithmetic operations on the MT-FPGA. Associated analysis and comparison of this new architecture with the original architecture is also presented.