Abstract
This thesis presents our investigations on how to efficiently utilize on-chip
wires to improve network performance in reconfigurable hardware. A fieldprogrammable
gate array (FPGA), as a key component in a modern reconfigurable
platform, accommodates many-millions of wires and the on-demand reconfigurability
is realized using this abundance of wires. Modern FPGAs become
computationally powerful as hardware IP (intellectual property) modules such as
embedded memories, processor cores, and DSP modules are accommodated. However,
the performance and the cost of the inter-IP communication remains a main
challenge. We meet this challenge in two aspects.
First, conventional general-purpose on-chip networks suffer from high area cost
when they are mapped onto the reconfigurable fabric. To reduce the area cost,
we present a topology customization technique for a given set of applications.
Specifically, we present an application-specific crossbar switch, crossbar schedulers,
point-to-point interconnects, and circuit-switched networks-on-chip (NoCs)
that reside on top of a reconfigurable fabric. As a result, by establishing only the
necessary network resources, our customized interconnects provide significantly
reduced cost compared to general-purpose on-chip networks.
Second, while the reconfigurability is a key benefit in FPGAs, it is traded off by
decreased performance and increased cost. This is mainly because of the bit-level
reconfigurable interconnects. To increase performance and reduce cost, we propose
to replace the bit-level reconfigurable wires by hardwired circuit-switched
interconnects for the inter-IP communication. Specifically, we present hardwired
crossbars and a circuit-switched NoC interconnect fabric. We describe the advantages
of the hardwired networks evidenced by the quantified performance analysis,
network simulation, and an implementation. As a result, the hardwired networks
provide two orders of magnitude better performance per area than the networks that
are mapped onto the reconfigurable fabric.
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Original language | English |
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Qualification | Doctor of Philosophy |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisors/Advisors |
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Award date | 28 Feb 2011 |
Place of Publication | Delft |
Publisher | |
Print ISBNs | 978-90-72298-13-3 |
Publication status | Published - 2011 |