Pushing the performance boundary of linear projection designs through device specific optimisations (abstract only)

Abstract

The continuous scaling of the fabrication process combined with the ever increasing need of high performance designs, means that the era of treating all devices the same is about to come to an end. The presented work considers device oriented optimisations in order to further boost the performance of a Linear Projection design by focusing on the over-clocking of arithmetic operators. A methodology is proposed for the acceleration of Linear Projection designs on an FPGA, that introduces information about the performance of the hardware under over-clocking conditions to the application level. The novelty of this method is a pre-characterisation of the most prone to error arithmetic operators and the utilisation of this information in the high-level optimization process of the design. This results in a set of circuit designs that achieve higher throughput with minimum error. FPGA devices are suitable for such optimisations due to their reconfigurability feature that allows performance characterisation of the underlying fabric prior to the design of the final system. The reported results show that significant gains in the performance of the system can be achieved, i.e. up to 1.85 times speed up in the throughput compared to existing methodologies, when such device specific optimisation is considered.