New Design Techniques for Existing and Futuristic FPGAs

Presentation: Departmental | November 5 | 5-6 p.m. | Cory Hall, 540 A/B

Speaker/Performer: Deming Chen, Department of ECE, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Sponsor: Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)

As cost and complexity for ASIC designs grow in a steady and rapid pace along the technology scaling, FPGA designs offer an attractive alternative. In this talk, I will mainly present two recent research results on FPGAs generated at University of Illinois. The first targets existing FPGAs for performance optimization using a novel BDD (binary decision graph)-based synthesis paradigm. We use a technique called linear expansion for BDD decomposition, which in turn enables a dynamic programming algorithm to efficiently search through the optimization space for the BDD. The second work targets a futuristic CNT (carbon nanotube)-based FPGA architecture named FPCNA. We define novel CNT and nanoswitch-based components and characterize these components considering nano-specific process variations, including the variation caused by the random mixture of metallic and semiconducting CNTs. To evaluate the architecture, we develop a variation-aware physical-design flow which can handle both Gaussian and non-Gaussian random variables using variation-aware placement and routing. At the end of the talk, I will also briefly introduce some other research activities we carried out recently, including a CUDA-to-FPGA design flow and variation-aware high-level synthesis.

Event Contact: 510-642-4829