Accelerating Incremental Floorplanning of Partially Reconfigurable Designs to Improve FPGA Productivity

FPGA implementation tool turnaround time has unfortunately not kept pace with FPGA density advances. It is difficult to parallelize place-and-route algorithms without sacrificing determinism or quality of results. We approach the problem in a different way for development environments in which some circuit speed and area optimization may be sacrificed for improved implementation and debug turnaround. The PATIS floorplanner enables dynamic modular design, which accelerates non-local changes to the physical layout arising from design exploration and the addition of debug circuitry. We focus in this work on incremental and speculative floorplanning in PATIS, to accommodate minor design changes and to proactively generate possible floorplan variants. Current floorplan topology is preserved to minimize ripple effects and maintain reasonable module aspect ratios. The design modules are run-time reconfigurable to enable concurrent module implementation by independent invocations of the standard FPGA tools running on separate cores or hosts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Chandrasekharan, Athira

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Patterson, Cameron D.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Athanas, Peter M.
• Plassmann, Paul E.

• Reconfigurable Computing
• Incremental Floorplanning
• FPGAs

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-08122010-161305

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/34499