Designing alternative FPGA implementations using spatial data from hardware resources

Abstract

A novel approach for efficient implementation of applications onto reconfigurable architectures is introduced. The proposed methodology can applied both for designing an interconnection architecture as well as for making a thermal-aware placement. In the first case, the dominant parameters that affect performance and energy (segment length and switch boxes) are examined. This approach is based on finding the optimal wire length and then making exploration in order to determine the appropriate combination of multiple switch boxes. In the second case, a new technique for thermal-aware placement is introduced. The main goal of this technique is to spread out the power consumption across the whole device, as well as to minimize it. Both of the methodologies are fully-supported by the software tool called EX-VPR. For the purposes of this paper, the EnergyxDelay Product (EDP) is chosen as selection criterion for the optimal interconnection network, while the total power consumption is the criterion for the thermal-aware routing. For the designing of the interconnection network we achieved EDP reduction by 45%, performance increase by 40% and reduction in total energy consumption by 8%, at the expense of increase of channel width by 20%. On the other hand, for the thermal-aware approach, we spread the heat and power across the whole FPGA, while we achieve about 20% reduction in total power consumption. In this case, the penalty in channel width is about 10%. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.