The VTR Project: Open Source Tools for FPGA Research
COM2 Level 4
Executive Classroom, COM2-04-02
Abstract:
FPGAs, microchips which can be re-programmed to implement a variety of digital circuits, have been shown to offer significant (10-100x) power and performance improvements over traditional CPUs on a variety of applications including digital signal processing, machine learning, and high performance computing. However mapping an application onto an FPGA architecture is a challenging process reliant on complex automated optimization tools. This complexity makes it impractical to re-develop such tools for each new FPGA architecture. How then can FPGA Architects designing the next generation of FPGAs evaluate their new architectures? The Verilog to Routing (VTR) project provides flexible general purpose tools for evaluating a variety of FPGA architectures. This talk describes how VTR manages the often conflicting challenges of remaining highly general while producing high quality results in reasonable run-time.
Biodata:
Kevin E. Murray received his BASc in Engineering Science in 2012 and MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2015, both from the University of Toronto, where he is a PhD candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has previously been a visiting Research Assistant at Imperial College London, and worked on digital design flows at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). His research interests include latency insensitive design methods, FPGA Architecture, and Computer Aided Design (CAD) algorithms for FPGAs. He is also the current lead developer of the Verilog to Routing (VTR) project for FPGA Architecture and CAD research.