Robin Bruce


System level design of FPGA reconfigurable computers

Nallatech 02 (2004-08)
Research Engineer: Robin Bruce
Sponsor: Nallatech
Academic Supervision: Dr Stephen Marshall, University of Strathclyde

The commercial success of FPGAs has enabled these devices to achieve very high capacities and offer a new computing paradigm that is demonstrating significant computing performance capabilities.

Computer hardware architectures such as the DIME standard have established a novel platform that puts FPGAs at the heart of its architecture and is able to unleash the performance that FPGAs can deliver. One of the issues with the growth of FPGAs’ capability is having the expertise and the tools to programme the device efficiently.

Furthermore FPGAs have absorbed much of the supporting logic, processors and interfacing typically implemented at board level. This is creating many system level design issues and with the flexibility of FPGA this adds further variables that the system engineer needs to explore and resolve.

This project will investigate the design flows for FPGA based computing systems investigating the creation of heterogeneous systems within the FPGA context. This will look at the system integration of soft and hard processors, fixed function units and programmable logic fabric. Scalability of computing systems is a critical factor for system engineers with the high performance needs that exist in product areas ranging from DSP to supercomputing applications. Tools are already available that enable the design of dynamic and scalable architectures for FPGAS and this research will look at new techniques to build on this knowledge.

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