학술논문

A technology mapper for depth-constrained FPGA logic cells
Document Type
Conference
Source
2015 25th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2015 25th International Conference on. :1-8 Sep, 2015
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Table lookup
Delays
Field programmable gate arrays
Linear programming
Libraries
Logic gates
Language
ISSN
1946-147X
1946-1488
Abstract
In the last decade, progress in logic synthesis has brought about new advantageous circuit representations. These representations, such as And-Inverter Graphs in the ubiquitous open-source synthesizer ABC, have inspired new designs of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), which, instead of using Look-Up Tables (LUTs), mimic the topology of the circuit representation in the basic logic cells. More recent examples are Majority-Inverter Graphs, another uniform representation which has triggered considerable interest in synthesis and which naturally suggests new logic cells. Yet, in this paper we observe how naïvely adapting technology mapping solutions for classic LUT-based FPGAs to these new architectures incurs severe shortcomings. The key issue is that LUTs are inherently input-constrained (the logic function they implement is irrelevant) and have generally a single output; on the other hand, logic cells made of uniform networks of some fundamental logic function (e.g., And-Invert) are constrained in terms of logic depth and multiple outputs are an integral feature. We introduce novel and effective solutions to address these differences; the result is a highly versatile mapper—thus enabling further research in these new architectures—with a significantly better performance than what is described in literature for one such architecture. Specifically, when we compare with the state of the art on one sample architecture, we obtain a significant decrease in area (on average 18% over several benchmarks) while also improving slightly the critical path (a reduction of 3%).