ADAM: Automated Design Analysis and Merging for Speeding up FPGA Development

This paper introduces ADAM, an approach for merging multiple FPGA designs into a single hardware design, so that multiple place-and-route tasks can be replaced by a single task to speed up functional evaluation of designs, especially during the development process. ADAM has three key elements. First, a novel approximate maximum common subgraph detection algorithm with linear time complexity to maximize sharing of resources in the merged design. Second, a prototype tool implementing this common subgraph detection algorithm for dataflow graphs derived from Verilog designs; this tool would also generate the appropriate control circuits to enable selection of the original designs at runtime. Third, a comprehensive analysis of compilation time versus degree of similarity to identify the optimized user parameters for the proposed approach. Experimental results show that ADAM can reduce compilation time by around 5 times when each design is 95% similar to the others, and the compilation time is reduced from 1 hour to 10 minutes in the case of binomial filters.