Title
VPR 5.0: FPGA cad and architecture exploration tools with single-driver routing, heterogeneity and process scaling
Abstract
The VPR toolset [6, 7] has been widely used to perform FPGA architecture and CAD research, but has not evolved over the past decade to include many architectural features now present in modern FPGAs. This paper describes a new version of the toolset that includes four significant features: first, it now supports a broad range of single-driver routing architectures [29, 4, 16]. Single-driver routing has significantly different architectural and electrical properties from the multi-driver approach previously modelled, and is now employed in the majority of FPGAs sold. Second, the new release can now model a heterogeneous selection of hard logic blocks, which could include the hard memory and multipliers that are now ubiquitous in FPGAs. Third, we provide optimized electrical models of a wide range of architectures in different process technologies, including a range of area-delay tradeoffs for each single architecture. Prior releases of VPR did not publish even one architecture file with accurate resistance and capacitance parameters. Finally, to maintain robustness and to support future development the release includes a set of regression tests to check functionality and quality of result of the output of the tools. To illustrate the use of the new features, we present a new look at the FPGA area vs. logic block LUT size question that shows that small LUT sizes, with the use of carefully optimized electrical design and single-driver architectures, have better area (relative to 4-LUTs) than previously thought. Another experiment shows that several of the previous architectural results are invariant in moving from multi-driver to single-driver routing architecture and across a range of process technologies.
Year
DOI
Venue
2009
10.1145/2068716.2068718
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems (TRETS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
placement,regression testing,field programmable gate array,fpga,routing,field programmable gate arrays
Lookup table,Computer science,Real-time computing,Robustness (computer science),CAD,Computer architecture,Architecture,Parallel computing,Field-programmable gate array,Regression testing,Logic block,Invariant (mathematics),Embedded system
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
4
4
1936-7406
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
70
3.41
19
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jason Luu147223.16
Ian Kuon266236.46
Peter Jamieson3703.41
Ted Campbell4703.41
Andy Ye5989.20
Wei Mark Fang6924.46
Jonathan Rose73522363.18