Design and Development of Application-Specific FPGA/Reconfigurable

Design and Development of Application-Specific FPGA/Reconfigurable Hardware Generator

Principal Investigator’s Organization (PIO):

PAF-Karachi Institute of Economics and Technology, Karachi

Principal Investigator (PI):

Dr.Muhammed Mohiuddin, Dr.Hussain Parvez

Summary

The Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are well known for their hardware flexibility which makes it possible and extremely simple to modify designs quickly, frequently and as late as desired in the design cycle. Low volume production of FPGA-based products is effective and economical because they are easy to design and program in shortest possible time. The generic reconfigurable resources in an FPGA can be programmed to execute a vast variety of applications. However, this very flexibility of FPGAs makes them much larger, slower, and more power consuming than their counterpart ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and ASSPs (Application Specific Standard Products). This project designed a GUI (Graphical User Interface)-based software platform which can be used to design, explore and generate application-specific FPGA and similar reconfigurable architectures. These alternate FPGA (reconfigurable) architectures were optimized for target applications in terms of area, speed and/or power consumption. The output of this tool was VHDL files of the optimized FPGA architecture which were translated into GDSII format files for fabrication using third-party tools. This platform also mapped application circuits on the architecture through advanced mapping algorithms and generated their bit streams (binary files). These application circuits encompassed fields as diverse as data and telecommunication, security, multimedia, medical, and other real-time Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems.