NDLI: Intermediate fabrics: Virtual architectures for circuit portability and fast placement and routing

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Coole, J. Stitt, G.
Copyright Year	2010
Description	Author affiliation: Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA (Coole, J.; Stitt, G.)
Abstract	Although hardware/software partitioning of embedded applications onto FPGAs is widely known to have performance and power advantages, FPGA usage has been typically limited to hardware experts, due largely to several problems: 1) difficulty of integrating hardware design tools into well-established software tool flows, 2) increasingly lengthy FPGA design iterations due to placement and routing, and 3) a lack of portability and interoperability resulting from device/platform-specific tools and bitfiles. In this paper, we directly address the last two problems by introducing intermediate fabrics, which are virtual reconfigurable architectures specialized for different application domains, implemented on top of commercial-off-the-shelf devices. Such specialization enables near-instantaneous placement and routing by hiding the complexity of fine-grained physical devices, while also enabling circuit portability across all devices that implement the intermediate fabric. When combined with existing work on runtime synthesis from software binaries, intermediate fabrics reduce the effects of all three problems by enabling transparent usage of COTS FPGAs by software designers. In this paper, we explore intermediate fabric architectures using specialization techniques to minimize area and performance overhead of the virtual fabric while maximizing routability and speedup of placement and routing. We present results showing an average placement and routing speedup of 554×, with an average area overhead of 10% and clock overhead of 18%, which corresponds to an average frequency of 195 MHz.
Sponsorship	IEEE Council on Electron. Design Autom.
Starting Page	13
Ending Page	22
File Size	1055346
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781605589053
e-ISBN	9781605589053
DOI	10.1145/1878961.1878966
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2010-10-24
Publisher Place	USA
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM)
Subject Keyword	Fabrics Field programmable gate arrays Routing Computer architecture Libraries Digital signal processing Integrated circuit modeling speedup intermediate fabrics placement and routing virtualization FPGA
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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