Exploration of Heterogeneous FPGA Architectures

Abstract

Mesh-based heterogeneous FPGAs are commonly used in industry and academia due to their area, speed, and power benefits over their homogeneous counterparts. These FPGAs contain a mixture of logic blocks and hard blocks where hard blocks are arranged in fixed columns as they offer an easy and compact layout. However, the placement of hard-blocks in fixed columns can potentially lead to underutilization of logic and routing resources and this problem is further aggravated with increase in the types of hardblocks. This work explores and compares different floor-planning techniques of mesh-based FPGA to determine their effect on the area, performance, and power of the architecture. A tree-based architecture is also presented; unlike mesh-based architecture, the floor-planning of heterogeneous tree-based architecture does not affect its routing requirements due to its hierarchical structure. Both mesh and tree-based architectures are evaluated for three sets of benchmark circuits. Experimental results show that a more flexible floor-planning in mesh-based FPGA gives better results as compared to the column-based floor-planning. Also it is shown that compared to different floor-plannings of mesh-based FPGA, tree-based architecture gives better area, performance, and power results.