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Optimality study of logic synthesis for LUT-based FPGAs

Published: 22 February 2006 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    FPGA logic synthesis and technology mapping have been studied extensively over the past 15 years. However, progress within the last few years has slowed considerably (with some notable exceptions). It seems natural to then question whether the current logic synthesis and technology mapping algorithms for FPGA designs are producing near-optimal solutions. Although there are many empirical studies that compare different FPGA synthesis/mapping algorithms, little is known about how far these algorithms are from the optimal (recall that both logic optimization and technology mapping problems are NP-hard if we consider area optimization in addition to delay/depth optimization). In this paper we present a novel method for constructing arbitrarily large circuits that have known optimal solutions after technology mapping. Using these circuits and their derivatives (called LEKO and LEKU, respectively), we show that although leading FPGA technology mapping algorithms can produce close to optimal solutions, the results from the entire logic synthesis flow (logic optimization + mapping) are far from optimal. The best industrial and academic FPGA synthesis flows are around 140 times larger in terms of area on average, and in some cases as much as 500 times larger on LEKU examples. These results clearly indicate that there is much room for further research and improvement in FPGA synthesis.

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    1. Optimality study of logic synthesis for LUT-based FPGAs

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      FPGA '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/SIGDA 14th international symposium on Field programmable gate arrays
      February 2006
      248 pages
      ISBN:1595932925
      DOI:10.1145/1117201
      • General Chair:
      • Steve Wilton,
      • Program Chair:
      • André DeHon
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 February 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. Boolean logic
      2. FPGA lookup table
      3. logic synthesis
      4. optimization
      5. technology mapping

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      • (2023)A Survey of Majority Logic Designs in Emerging Nanotechnologies for ComputingIEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology10.1109/TNANO.2023.332619922(732-739)Online publication date: 2023
      • (2022)Design of Full Digital Signal Generator and FIR Digital Filter System Based on FPGA2022 41st Chinese Control Conference (CCC)10.23919/CCC55666.2022.9901637(4501-4506)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2022
      • (2018)Benchmarking in digital circuit design automationWSEAS Transactions on Circuits and Systems10.5555/1482050.14820657:4(287-310)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2018
      • (2012)Methodology for early estimation of hierarchical routing resources in 3D FPGAs2012 IEEE/IFIP 20th International Conference on VLSI and System-on-Chip (VLSI-SoC)10.1109/VLSI-SoC.2012.7332103(213-218)Online publication date: Oct-2012
      • (2012)Methodology for early estimation of hierarchical routing resources in 3D FPGAs2012 IEEE/IFIP 20th International Conference on VLSI and System-on-Chip (VLSI-SoC)10.1109/VLSI-SoC.2012.6379032(213-218)Online publication date: Oct-2012
      • (2011)MO-packProceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference10.1145/2024724.2024908(818-823)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2011
      • (2011)An analytical energy model to accelerate FPGA logic architecture investigation2011 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology10.1109/FPT.2011.6132683(1-8)Online publication date: Dec-2011
      • (2009)Case studies in determining the optimal field programmable gate array design for computing highly parallelisable problemsIET Computers & Digital Techniques10.1049/iet-cdt.2008.00423:3(247)Online publication date: 2009
      • (2008)FPGA area reduction by multi-output function based sequential resynthesisProceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference10.1145/1391469.1391478(24-29)Online publication date: 8-Jun-2008
      • (2008)High-Quality Circuit Synthesis for Modern Technologies9th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (isqed 2008)10.1109/ISQED.2008.4479720(168-173)Online publication date: Mar-2008
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