Rapid Prototyping and Functional Verification of Power Efficient AI Processor on FPGA

Prototyping a design on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) involves different stages such as developing a design, performing synthesis, handling placement and routing and finally generating the programming bit file for the FPGA. After successful completion of the above stages, it is important to functionally verify the design. This thesis addresses the challenges involved in rapid prototyping and functional verification of a low power AI processor provided by the industry partner. This research also addresses the methodology used in generating programming bit file and testing the design. Traditional method of testing a design using RTL level testbench utilises more time and relies on functioning of other components associated with the design. This thesis incorporated a new technique of testing the design using software programs focusing on verification of the functionality of a particular module without depending on the other. This methodology reduced the time for functionality verification for part of the design from approximately 1 month to about 2 weeks. Finally, using the methodology mentioned above, the design was synthesized for two FPGA kits, along with analysing the power consumption of the design. The results show the low power nature of the design as it does not use any external memory resulting in faster Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) operations thereby saving time to access the data