Date of Submission

6-1-2009

Date of Award

6-1-2010

Institute Name (Publisher)

Indian Statistical Institute

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Subject Name

Mathematics

Department

Advance Computing and Microelectronics Unit (ACMU-Kolkata)

Supervisor

Sur-Kolay, Susmita (ACMU-Kolkata; ISI)

Abstract (Summary of the Work)

FPGA Field-programmable gate-arrays (FPGA) are programmable hardware platforms with pre-fabricated logic and interconnects, which are electrically programmed by the user to realize a variety of circuits frequently required in a wide range of applications. Unlike application-specific integrated-circuits (ASICs), where realization of a circuit design takes several man-hours and enormous effort, the pre-fabricated logic and interconnects can be quickly programmed according to the design specification and made functional. Thus, in contrast to the ASICs, FPGAs can be customized and reconfigured depending on the need of the user. A basic FPGA chip consists of a set of configurable logic blocks (CLB) and interconnects which can be connected by means of transistor switches or anti-fuses. Each CLB consists of small memory units in the form of lookup tables (LUT) which can be programmed at run-time. To realize a circuit on to FPGA, these LUTs need to be loaded with appropriate functionality in terms of bits at run-time. Given a circuit design, it undergoes several optimization steps [Betz 1999] to get realized on to the FPGA chip. Finally, a bitstream of the design is generated that is downloaded on to the FPGA chip. This process of realizing a circuit on to the FPGA chip is called mapping. Once the bitstream is loaded on to the chip, the circuit starts functioning. To realize a different circuit on the same chip, one has to download only the corresponding bitstream on to the FPGA chip. Being reconfigurable, the turn-around time for the application is significantly less than realizing an application on ASIC.FPGAs have experienced an exponential growth in the past twenty years and are increasingly competing with ASICs in medium to low volume market [Wang 2003]. FPGAs were introduced in mid to late eighties with merely 64 lookup tables (LUTs) as simple glue logic, whereas modern FPGAs offer up to over two billion programmable logic cells along with a large number of macro blocks such as memory, DSP blocks, embedded processors, high speed Input/Outputs and many other pre-placed blocks [Kuon 2007]. The reason for the success of FPGAs is their low non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs and reconfigurability. Because of reconfigurability and fast turn-around time, FPGAs are not only used in ASIC prototyping as in earlier days, but also in mission critical applications. Now with millions of logic gates in an FPGA, with shorter design and production time, lower setup cost and risk, it is extensively used in space applications, digital signal processing (DSP), software defined radio, aerospace, defense, medical imaging, speech recognition and bio-informatics [Xilinx , Brown 1995, Manimegalai 2007]. In order to take the full advantage of FPGA’s reconfigurability, the mapping time of a given design on to FPGA chip has to be minimized. The process of mapping is a complex task, involving conflicting objectives to be satisfied during the process. As in ASICs, the mapping of a design on to the FPGA consists of the following design steps: synthesis, technology mapping, floorplanning and place-and-route. The problems to be solved for almost all the steps are difficult in nature, and belong to the class of NP-hard problems [Sherwani 1993]. Thus, it is not possible to design polynomial time algorithms to solve the problems optimally. The computer-aideddesign (CAD) tools play a critical role in obtaining solutions of high quality with efficiency. Although these design steps seem to be similar to those for the traditional ASIC design, each step of FPGA design has additional constraints and optimization criteria to be satisfied [Wang 2003, Taghavi 2004].

Comments

ProQuest Collection ID: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:28842847

Control Number

ISILib-TH362

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

http://dspace.isical.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/10263/2146

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