FPGA器件设计技术发展综述

现场可编程门阵列(Field Programmable Gate Array,FPGA)作为一种可编程逻辑器件,在短短二十多年里从电子设计的外围器件逐渐演变为数字系统的核心,在计算机硬件、通信、航空航天和汽车电子等诸多领域有着广泛的应用。伴随着半导体工艺技术的进步,FPGA器件的设计技术取得了飞跃性突破。该文在回顾FPGA发展历史的同时,对目前主流FPGA器件的前沿技术进行总结,并对新一代FPGA的发展前景进行展望。     

Speed and area tradeoffs in cluster-based FPGA architectures

One way to reduce the delay and area of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) is to employ logic-cluster-based architectures, where a logic cluster is a group of logic elements connected with high-speed local interconnections. In this paper, we empirically evaluate FPGA architectures with logic clusters ranging in size from 1 to 20, and show that compared to architectures with size 1 clusters, architectures with size 8 clusters have 23% less delay (30% faster clock speed) and require 14% less area. We also show that FPGA architectures with large cluster sizes can significantly reduce design compile time-an increasingly important concern as the logic capacity of FPGA's rises. For example, an architecture that uses size 20 clusters requires seven times less compile time than an architecture with size 1 clusters     

面向AIC结构的FPGA映射工具

探索新的现场可编程门阵列(FPGA)逻辑单元结构一直是FPGA结构研究的重点方向,与非逻辑锥(AIC)作为一种新的逻辑结构成为FPGA新结构的希望。然而实现高效且灵活的映射工具同样是研究FPGA新结构中的重点环节。该文实现了一个面向AIC结构的FPGA映射工具,与当前映射工具相比,具有更高的灵活性,能够支持AIC结构参数的调节,辅助支持进行AIC单元结构的探索改进。同时,该文提出的AIC映射工具与原工具相比,面积指标提高了33%~36%。     

The flexibility of configurable computing

There has been growing recent interest in configurable computing, which can be viewed as a hybrid between ASICs and programmable processors. Configurable computing machines are implemented with programmable logic: flexible hardware that can be structured to fit the natural organization and data flow of a computation. The enabling device for configurable computing is the field-programmable array (FPGA). For applications characterized by deeply pipelined, highly parallel, and integer arithmetic processing, configurable computing machines can outperform alternative solutions by up to an order of magnitude. The combination in a single device of dedicated hardware and rapid, submillisecond-scale reprogrammability constitutes an exciting and promising development whose implications are only just beginning to be exploited. We begin with a brief tutorial on FPGAs that describes the most common FPGA architectures and how these architectures are used to support computation, memory access, and data flow. We then present FPGAs as computing machines and focus on devices that are reconfigured during run time. Ongoing research involving FPGAs and future directions are also discussed     

FPGA-based implementation of classification techniques: A survey

Recently, a number of classification techniques have been introduced. However, processing large dataset in a reasonable time has become a major challenge. This made classification task more complex and expensive in calculation. Thus, the need for solutions to overcome these constraints such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, we give an overview of the various classification techniques. Then, we present the existing FPGA based implementation of these classification methods. After that, we investigate the confronted challenges and the optimizations strategies. Finally, we highlight the hardware accelerator architectures and tools for hardware design suggested to improve the FPGA implementation of classification methods.     

DSP system integration and prototyping with FPGAS

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer a cost-effective and flexible technology for DSP ASIC prototype development. In this article, the fast ASIC prototyping concept based on the use of multiple FPGAs is reviewed in different engineering applications. The design experiences of the proposed approach, applied to four different DSP ASIC design projects are presented. The design experiences concerning the selection of the design methodology, application architectures and prototyping technologies are analyzed with respect to efficient system integration and ASIC migration from the FPGA prototype onto first-time functional silicon. Novel prototyping techniques based on using configurable hardware modellers concerning the same objective are studied. Some future goals are outlined to develop an integrated, multipurpose DSP ASIC prototyping environment.     

Evaluating Different Solutions to Design Fault Tolerant Systems with SRAM-based FPGAs

The latest SRAM-based FPGA devices are making the development of low-cost, high-performance, re-configurable systems feasible, paving the way for innovative architectures suitable for mission- or safety-critical applications, such as those dominating the space or avionic fields. Unfortunately, SRAM-based FPGAs are extremely sensitive to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) induced by radiation. SEUs may alter the logic value stored in the memory elements the FPGAs embed. A large part of the FPGA memory elements is dedicated to the configuration memory, whose content dictates how the resources inside the FPGA have to be used to implement any given user circuit, SEUs affecting configuration memory cells can be extremely critics. Facing the effects of SEUs through radiation-hardened FPGAs is not cost-effective. Therefore, various fault-tolerant design techniques have been devised for developing dependable solutions, starting from Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) SRAM-based FPGAs. These techniques present advantages and disadvantages that must be evaluated carefully to exploit them successfully. In this paper we mainly adopted an empirical analysis approach. We evaluated the reliability of a multiplier, a digital FIR filter, and an 8051 microprocessor implemented in SRAM-based FPGA’s, by means of extensive fault-injection experiments, assessing the capability provided by different design techniques of tolerating SEUs within the FPGA configuration memory. Experimental results demonstrate that by combining architecture-level solutions (based on redundancy) with layout-level solutions (based on reliability-oriented place and route) designers may implement reliable re-configurable systems choosing the best solution that minimizes the penalty in terms of area and speed degradation.     

A regular fabric design methodology for applications requiring specific layout-level design rules

Regular fabrics have been introduced as an approach to bridge the gap between ASICs and FPGAs in terms of cost and performance. Indeed, compared to an ASIC, by predefining most of the manufacturing masks, they highly reduce time-to-market, non-recoverable engineering costs and lithography hazards. Also, thanks to hardwired configuration and interconnections their performance is closer to those of ASICs than those of FPGAs. They are therefore well suited to many applications requiring low to medium volume applications or higher performance than those provided by FPGAs.In this paper, we evaluate the interest of using a regular fabric to reduce time and design cost significantly in applications involving specific transistor level design (radiative/spacial conditions, side-channel attacks, NMR environment, etc.). With this aim in view, after a broad state of the art overview with an emphasis on architectures and design flows, we develop our approach of a regular fabric designed to limit layout level design, ad-hoc tools and technological migration cost. Then, we evaluate its performance in a 65 nm process versus FPGA and standard cell based ASIC implementations. For sequential designs, our proposed solution is on average 2.5×slower and 2.3×bigger than a standard cell implantation, but also on average 13×faster than a FPGA.     

NEW APPROACH TO EMULATE SEU FAULTS ON SRAM BASED FPGAS简

Field Programmable Gate Arrays （FPGAs） offer high capability in implementing of com- plex systems, and currently are an attractive solution for space system electronics. However, FPGAs are susceptible to radiation induced Single-Event Upsets （SEUs）. To insure reliable operation of FPGA based systems in a harsh radiation environment, various SEU mitigation techniques have been provided In this paper we propose a system based on dynamic partial reconfiguration capability of the modern devices to evaluate the SEU fault effect in FPGA. The proposed approach combines the fault injection controller with the host FPGA, and therefore the hardware complexity is minimized. All of the SEU injection and evaluation requirements are performed by a soft-core which realized inside the host FPGA Experimental results on some standard benchmark circuits reveal that the proposed system is able to speed up the fault injection campaign 50 times in compared to conventional method.     

Security Path: An Emerging Design Methodology to Protect the FPGA IPs Against Passive/Active Design Tampering

Modern FPGAs have a great market share in hardware prototyping, massive parallel systems and reconfigurable architectures. Although the field-programmability of FPGAs is an effective feature in the growth and diversity of their applications; it has caused security concerns for IPs/Designs on FPGAs. Recent researches show that a reliable mechanism is required to protect the IPs/applications on FPGAs against malicious manipulations during all stages of design lifecycle, especially when they are operating in the field. In this paper, we propose a new tamper-resistant design methodology (Security Path methodology) and a revised security-aware FPGA architecture. This methodology protects the configured design against tampering attacks in parallel with the normal operation of the circuit. When the attack is discovered, the normal data flow is obfuscated and the circuit is blocked. Experimental results show that this methodology provides near full coverage in tampering detection with overhead of 12.32 % in power, 12 % in delay and 38 % in area.     

Architecture of field-programmable gate arrays

A survey of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) architectures and the programming technologies used to customize them is presented. Programming technologies are compared on the basis of their volatility, size parasitic capacitance, resistance, and process technology complexity. FPGA architectures are divided into two constituents: logic block architectures and routing architectures. A classification of logic blocks based on their granularity is proposed, and several logic blocks used in commercially available FPGAs are described. A brief review of recent results on the effect of logic block granularity on logic density and performance of an FPGA is then presented. Several commercial routing architectures are described in the context of a general routing architecture model. Finally, recent results on the tradeoff between the flexibility of an FPGA routing architecture, its routability, and its density are reviewed     

CPLD／FPGA的发展与应用之比较

可编程逻辑器件（Programmable Logic Device，PLD）是一种可由用户对其进行编程的大规模通用集成电路。从PLD的发展历程着眼，主要对PLD的2个发展分支——复杂可编程逻辑器件和现场可编程门阵列的基本结构、功能优势和应用场合进行了较详尽的分析和比较；并从结构和定义上指出二者的区别，同时根据不同技术要求和设计环境指出了相应的CPLD和FPGA的选择方法，最后给出了PLD最新研究热点和未来的发展趋势。     

Efficient recursive multiply architecture for FPGAs

A new methodology for realising efficient multiply architectures for FPGAs is presented. The proposed strategy can be recursively applied to realise larger multipliers. Compared to proprietary macroblocks usually furnished within FPGA development tools, the new approach is more than 45% cheaper and more than 25% faster.     

Circuits and architectures for field programmable gate array with configurable supply voltage

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with supply voltage (Vdd) programmability have been proposed recently to reduce FPGA power, where the Vdd-level can be customized for FPGA circuit elements and unused circuit elements can be power-gated. In this paper, we first design novel Vdd-programmable and Vdd-gateable interconnect switches with minimal number of configuration SRAM cells. We then evaluate Vdd-programmable FPGA architectures using the new switches. The best architecture in our study uses Vdd-programmable logic blocks and Vdd-gateable interconnects. Compared to the baseline architecture similar to the leading commercial architecture, our best architecture reduces the minimal energy-delay product by 54.39% with 17% more area and 3% more configuration SRAM cells. Our evaluation results also show that LUT size 4 gives the lowest energy consumption, and LUT size 7 leads to the highest performance, both for all evaluated architectures.     

Low leakage techniques for FPGAs

Reconfigurable architectures are well suited for wireless applications since they provide high performance computation together with the capability to adapt to changing communication protocols. Moving to 90-nm technology and below, FPGAs could suffer from leakage energy consumption due to the large number of inactive transistors. This paper presents an extensive study on the application of different low-leakage techniques to the design of FPGAs. The approaches are compared and mixed to find an implementation of switch blocks and look-up tables which reduces leakage without affecting delay and area. The circuits we propose achieve an 86% stand-by energy saving and 46% active leakage reduction with respect to standard implementations. The FPGA delay is not affected, while area is increased by only 3%.     

Path reuse-aware routing for non-volatile memory based FPGAs

Non-volatile memory-based FPGAs (NV-FPGAs) are expected to replace traditional SRAM-based FPGAs to achieve higher scalability and lower power consumption. Yet the slow write performance of NVMs not only challenges FPGA reconfiguration speed and overhead but also constrains the programming cycles of FPGAs. To efficiently configure switch boxes, the majority component of an FPGA, this paper presents a routing path reuse technique. The reconfiguration cost of routing resources is first modeled mathematically and then minimized through a reuse-aware routing algorithm, which is incorporated into the standard VTR CAD tool. Experiments on standard MCNC and Titan benchmarks show that the proposed scheme is able to achieve as much as 58% path reuse rate and reduce as much as 45% configuration cost for routing resources.     

A NEW APPROACH TO PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC ARRAY FOR SINGLE-CLOCK CMOS

Programmable Logic Array （PLA） is an important building circuit of VLSI chips and some of the FPGA architectures have evolved from the basic PLA architectures. In this letter, a dynamic and static mixed PLA with single-phased clock is presented. Combining both dynamic and static design style rather than introducing additional interface-buffers overcomes the racing problem, thereby saves the chip area. Besides inheriting the advantages of dynamic circuit--low power dissipation and compact structure, this approach also provides high-speed operation.     

基于星地链路的FPGA在轨可重构设计

随着信号处理算法的发展,人们对航天用现场可编程门阵列（Field Programmable Gate Array, FPGA）提出了算法可更新的需求。而传统的固定算法模式已经无法满足要求,所以星上FPGA在轨可重构设计成为了解决这一问题的关键。提出了一种基于星地链路的FPGA在轨可重构设计方案。通过星地链路上载配置数据并将其存入电可擦除只读存储器（Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, EEPROM）内,然后利用反熔丝器件对FPGA进行大规模算法重配置操作。这项设计方案已经通过了相关验证,同时也提升了星载FPGA的灵活性。