A Basic, Four Logic Cluster, Disjoint Switch Connected FPGA Architecture

This paper seeks to describe the process of developing a new FPGA architecture from nothing, both in terms of knowledge about FPGAs and in initial design material. Specifically, this project set out to design an FPGA architecture which can implement a simple state machine type design with 10 inputs, 10 outputs and 10 states. The open source Verilog-to-Routing FPGA CAD flow tool was used in order to synthesize, place, and route HDL files onto the architecture. This project was completed in terms of the spirit of the original goals of implementing an FPGA from scratch. Although, the project resulted in an architecture which slightly underperformed in its ability to route 100% of 10 input, 10 output, 10 state designs due to the general place and route algorithm used and the lack of non-contrived 10 input 10 output 10 state FSM designs

FASTCUDA: Open Source FPGA Accelerator & Hardware-Software Codesign Toolset for CUDA Kernels

Using FPGAs as hardware accelerators that communicate with a central CPU is becoming a common practice in the embedded design world but there is no standard methodology and toolset to facilitate this path yet. On the other hand, languages such as CUDA and OpenCL provide standard development environments for Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) programming. FASTCUDA is a platform that provides the necessary software toolset, hardware architecture, and design methodology to efficiently adapt the CUDA approach into a new FPGA design flow. With FASTCUDA, the CUDA kernels of a CUDA-based application are partitioned into two groups with minimal user intervention: those that are compiled and executed in parallel software, and those that are synthesized and implemented in hardware. A modern low power FPGA can provide the processing power (via numerous embedded micro-CPUs) and the logic capacity for both the software and hardware implementations of the CUDA kernels. This paper describes the system requirements and the architectural decisions behind the FASTCUDA approach

Design of Novel Algorithm and Architecture for Gaussian Based Color Image Enhancement System for Real Time Applications

This paper presents the development of a new algorithm for Gaussian based color image enhancement system. The algorithm has been designed into architecture suitable for FPGA/ASIC implementation. The color image enhancement is achieved by first convolving an original image with a Gaussian kernel since Gaussian distribution is a point spread function which smoothen the image. Further, logarithm-domain processing and gain/offset corrections are employed in order to enhance and translate pixels into the display range of 0 to 255. The proposed algorithm not only provides better dynamic range compression and color rendition effect but also achieves color constancy in an image. The design exploits high degrees of pipelining and parallel processing to achieve real time performance. The design has been realized by RTL compliant Verilog coding and fits into a single FPGA with a gate count utilization of 321,804. The proposed method is implemented using Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP40-7FF1148 FPGA device and is capable of processing high resolution color motion pictures of sizes of up to 1600x1200 pixels at the real time video rate of 116 frames per second. This shows that the proposed design would work for not only still images but also for high resolution video sequences.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figure

Comparing the performance of FPGA-based custom computers with general-purpose computers for DSP applications

When FPGA logic circuits are incorporated within a stored-program computer, the result is a machine where the programmer can design both the software and the hardware that will execute that software. This paper first describes some of the more important custom computers, and their potential weakness as DSP implementation platforms. It then describes a new custom computing architecture which is specifically designed for efficient implementation of DSP algorithms. Finally, it presents a simple performance comparison of a number of DSP implementation alternatives, and concludes that the new custom computing architecture is worthy of further investigation, and that custom computers based only on FPGA execution units show little performance improvement over state-of-the-art workstations

APEnet+: high bandwidth 3D torus direct network for petaflops scale commodity clusters

We describe herein the APElink+ board, a PCIe interconnect adapter featuring the latest advances in wire speed and interface technology plus hardware support for a RDMA programming model and experimental acceleration of GPU networking; this design allows us to build a low latency, high bandwidth PC cluster, the APEnet+ network, the new generation of our cost-effective, tens-of-thousands-scalable cluster network architecture. Some test results and characterization of data transmission of a complete testbench, based on a commercial development card mounting an Altera FPGA, are provided.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, proceeding of CHEP 2010, Taiwan, October 18-2

High-Throughput FPGA Implementation of QR Decomposition

Munoz, S.D.; Hormigo, J. "High-Throughput FPGA Implementation of QR Decomposition" IEEE Transactions on in Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs,vol.62, no.9, pp.861-865, Sept. 2015 doi: 10.1109/TCSII.2015.2435753This brief presents a hardware design to achieve high-throughput QR decomposition, using Givens Rotation Method. It utilizes a new two-dimensional systolic array architecture with pipelined processing elements, which are based on the COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm. CORDIC computes vector rotations through shifts and additions. This approach allows a continuous computation of QR factorizations with simple hardware. A fixed-point FPGA architecture for 4 x 4 matrices has been optimized by balancing the number of CORDIC iterations with the final error. As a result, compared to other previous proposals for FPGA, our design achieves at least 50% more throughput, and much less resource utilization.Ministry of Education and Science of Spain and Junta of Andalucia under contracts TIN2013-42253-P and P07-TIC-02630, respectively

Pentimento: Data Remanence in Cloud FPGAs

Cloud FPGAs strike an alluring balance between computational efficiency, energy efficiency, and cost. It is the flexibility of the FPGA architecture that enables these benefits, but that very same flexibility that exposes new security vulnerabilities. We show that a remote attacker can recover "FPGA pentimenti" - long-removed secret data belonging to a prior user of a cloud FPGA. The sensitive data constituting an FPGA pentimento is an analog imprint from bias temperature instability (BTI) effects on the underlying transistors. We demonstrate how this slight degradation can be measured using a time-to-digital (TDC) converter when an adversary programs one into the target cloud FPGA. This technique allows an attacker to ascertain previously safe information on cloud FPGAs, even after it is no longer explicitly present. Notably, it can allow an attacker who knows a non-secret "skeleton" (the physical structure, but not the contents) of the victim's design to (1) extract proprietary details from an encrypted FPGA design image available on the AWS marketplace and (2) recover data loaded at runtime by a previous user of a cloud FPGA using a known design. Our experiments show that BTI degradation (burn-in) and recovery are measurable and constitute a security threat to commercial cloud FPGAs.Comment: 17 Pages, 8 Figure