Design Space Exploration Of Field Programmable Counter Arrays And Their Integration With FPGAs

Abstract: Field Programmable Counter Arrays (FPCAs) have been recently introduced to close the gap between FPGA and ASICs for arithmetic dominated applications. FPCAs are reconfigurable lattices that can be embedded into FPGAs to efficiently compute the result of multi-operand additions. The first contribution of this work is a Design Space Exploration (DSE) of the FPCAs and the identification of trade-offs between different parameters which describe them. Methods for analyzing and pruning the design space are proposed to enable a smart exploration. Finally, a set of best performing architectures in terms of area and delay is determined. Secondly, a study of possible integration schemes to build a hybrid FPGA/FPCA chip is performed. The goal is to find a solution with optimal usage of on-chip silicon area. The advantages and disadvantages of each solution are studied and a new integration solution based on properties of FPCAs is suggested. A VLSI implementation proves the applicability of the proposed solutions.