A challenge of portable and high-speed FPGA accelerator

Abstract

FPGA accelerators can achieve higher computation performance and better power efficiency than CPUs and GPUs, because designers can implement circuits that realize application-specific pipelined hardware and data supply system. In this paper, we propose a portable and high-speed FPGA accelerator employing USB3.0 which is a data transfer interface with high versatility and high speed. We choose sorting as a practical application for the FPGA accelerator, and then design and implement the FPGA accelerator that executes sorting at high speed. To demonstrate the high portability, we evaluate the FPGA accelerator with several desktop PCs and laptop PCs. The evaluation result shows the sorting speed of the proposed FPGA accelerator is 1.26x and 2.60x higher than Intel Core i7-3770K operating at 3.5GHz and Intel Core i3-4010U operating at 1.83GHz, respectively. From this evaluation, we also show that the proposed FPGA accelerator has high portability.