System Design – Leveraging Capability, Overcoming Complexity

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• Suhaib Fahmy (Imperial College London)
• Thursday 06 August 2009, 13:00-14:00
• Room 611, EEE.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact George A Constantinides.

FPG As provide a unique opportunity to design fully tailored architectures that eke out maximum performance, while avoiding the high start-up costs of custom ASIC designs. This talk elucidates this opportunity and some of the associated challenges. The first part concerns novel and innovative architectures, that exploit the parallel capabilities of FPG As, which are key to high performance implementations. Two example applications in the computer vision and image processing domains are presented: the Trace transform, and large-windowed one-dimensional median filters. The unique challenges in terms of parallelism and scalability are discussed, along with the novel, FPGA -centric approaches used to solve them.

The second part shows how extending the flexibility of systems, by leveraging dynamic partial reconfiguration, can be greatly simplified through the use of a framework and tools that abstract away the complexity of such designs. Such a framework is presented; it abstracts the adaptation mechanism from the underlying hardware, allowing system designers with no hardware experience to build applications targeting reconfigurable devices. A case study shows that using adaptation in a coded wireless transmission scenario can save 60% in power consumption over a static implementation.

The talk concludes by highlighting the challenge of overcoming the complexity of custom architecture design that leverages the various capabilities afforded on modern devices. Despite the great flexibility and general applicability of FPG As, without the tools and frameworks to simplify the design process, other platforms continue to attract more attention. Addressing this challenge using an application-driven approach has the potential to propel FPG As into the mainstream.

This talk is part of the CAS Talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Andrea Picciau's list
• CAS Talks
• Circuits and Systems Group: Internal Seminars
• Room 611, EEE

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