3,770 research outputs found
Timing verification of dynamically reconfigurable logic for Xilinx Virtex FPGA series
This paper reports on a method for extending existing VHDL design and verification software available for the Xilinx Virtex series of FPGAs. It allows the designer to apply standard hardware design and verification tools to the design of dynamically reconfigurable logic (DRL). The technique involves the conversion of a dynamic design into multiple static designs, suitable for input to standard synthesis and APR tools. For timing and functional verification after APR, the sections of the design can then be recombined into a single dynamic system. The technique has been automated by extending an existing DRL design tool named DCSTech, which is part of the Dynamic Circuit Switching (DCS) CAD framework. The principles behind the tools are generic and should be readily extensible to other architectures and CAD toolsets. Implementation of the dynamic system involves the production of partial configuration bitstreams to load sections of circuitry. The process of creating such bitstreams, the final stage of our design flow, is summarized
A FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Software Architecture for Highly Dependable Systems
Nowadays, systems-on-chip are commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware. The use of hybrid architectures based on a mixture of general purpose processors and reconfigurable components has gained importance across the scientific community allowing a significant improvement of computational performance. Along with the demand for performance, the great sensitivity of reconfigurable hardware devices to physical defects lead to the request of highly dependable and fault tolerant systems. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable software architecture able to abstract the underlying hardware platform giving an homogeneous view of it. The abstraction mechanism is used to implement fault tolerance mechanisms with a minimum impact on the system performanc
Coarse-grained reconfigurable array architectures
Coarse-Grained ReconïŹgurable Array (CGRA) architectures accelerate the same inner loops that beneïŹt from the high ILP support in VLIW architectures. By executing non-loop code on other cores, however, CGRAs can focus on such loops to execute them more efïŹciently. This chapter discusses the basic principles of CGRAs, and the wide range of design options available to a CGRA designer, covering a large number of existing CGRA designs. The impact of different options on ïŹexibility, performance, and power-efïŹciency is discussed, as well as the need for compiler support. The ADRES CGRA design template is studied in more detail as a use case to illustrate the need for design space exploration, for compiler support and for the manual ïŹne-tuning of source code
Exploiting partial reconfiguration through PCIe for a microphone array network emulator
The current Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) technology enables the deployment of relatively low-cost wireless sensor networks composed of MEMS microphone arrays for accurate sound source localization. However, the evaluation and the selection of the most accurate and power-efficient networkâs topology are not trivial when considering dynamic MEMS microphone arrays. Although software simulators are usually considered, they consist of high-computational intensive tasks, which require hours to days to be completed. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based platform to emulate a network of microphone arrays. Our platform provides a controlled simulated acoustic environment, able to evaluate the impact of different network configurations such as the number of microphones per array, the networkâs topology, or the used detection method. Data fusion techniques, combining the data collected by each node, are used in this platform. The platform is designed to exploit the FPGAâs partial reconfiguration feature to increase the flexibility of the network emulator as well as to increase performance thanks to the use of the PCI-express high-bandwidth interface. On the one hand, the network emulator presents a higher flexibility by partially reconfiguring the nodesâ architecture in runtime. On the other hand, a set of strategies and heuristics to properly use partial reconfiguration allows the acceleration of the emulation by exploiting the execution parallelism. Several experiments are presented to demonstrate some of the capabilities of our platform and the benefits of using partial reconfiguration
Transformations of High-Level Synthesis Codes for High-Performance Computing
Specialized hardware architectures promise a major step in performance and
energy efficiency over the traditional load/store devices currently employed in
large scale computing systems. The adoption of high-level synthesis (HLS) from
languages such as C/C++ and OpenCL has greatly increased programmer
productivity when designing for such platforms. While this has enabled a wider
audience to target specialized hardware, the optimization principles known from
traditional software design are no longer sufficient to implement
high-performance codes. Fast and efficient codes for reconfigurable platforms
are thus still challenging to design. To alleviate this, we present a set of
optimizing transformations for HLS, targeting scalable and efficient
architectures for high-performance computing (HPC) applications. Our work
provides a toolbox for developers, where we systematically identify classes of
transformations, the characteristics of their effect on the HLS code and the
resulting hardware (e.g., increases data reuse or resource consumption), and
the objectives that each transformation can target (e.g., resolve interface
contention, or increase parallelism). We show how these can be used to
efficiently exploit pipelining, on-chip distributed fast memory, and on-chip
streaming dataflow, allowing for massively parallel architectures. To quantify
the effect of our transformations, we use them to optimize a set of
throughput-oriented FPGA kernels, demonstrating that our enhancements are
sufficient to scale up parallelism within the hardware constraints. With the
transformations covered, we hope to establish a common framework for
performance engineers, compiler developers, and hardware developers, to tap
into the performance potential offered by specialized hardware architectures
using HLS
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