• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.29 no.7
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• pp.422-430
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• 2002

For a time-multiplexed FPGA, a circuit is partitioned into several subcircuits, so that they temporally share the same physical FPGA device by hardware reconfiguration. In these architectures, all the hardware reconfiguration information called contexts are generated and downloaded into the chip, and then the pre-scheduled context switches occur properly and timely. Since the maximum number of the LUT's required in the same time determines the size of the chip used in the synthesis, it needs to be minimized, if possible. Many previous work use their own approaches, which are very similar to either scheduling method in high level synthesis or multi-way circuit partitioning method, to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose a method which estimates the lower bound on the number of LUT's without performing any actual synthesis. The estimated lower bounds help to evaluate the results of the previous work. If the estimated lower bound on the number of LUT's exactly matches the number of LUT's of the result from the previous work, the result must be optimal. In contrast, if they do not match, the following two cases are expected : the more exact lower bound may exist, or we might find the new synthesis result better than the result from the previous work. Experimental results show that our lower bound estimation method is very accurate. In almost al] cases experimented, the estimated lower bounds on the number of LUT's exactly match those of the previous synthesis results respectively, implying that the best results from the previous work are optimal as well as our method predicted the exact lower bound for those examples.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.30 no.9
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• pp.512-522
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• 2003

For a time-multiplexed FPGA, a circuit is partitioned into several subcircuits, so that they temporally share the same physical FPGA device by hardware reconfiguration. In these architectures, all the hardware reconfiguration information called contexts are generated and downloaded into the chip, and then the pre-scheduled context switches occur properly and timely. Typically, the size of the chip required to implement the circuit depends on both the maximum number of the LUT blocks required to implement the function of each subcircuit and the maximum number of micro-registers to store results over context switches in the same time. Therefore, many partitioning or synthesis methods try to minimize these two factors. In this paper, we present a new estimation technique to find the lower bound on the number of micro-registers which can be obtained by any synthesis methods, respectively, without performing any actual synthesis and/or design space exploration. The lower bound estimation is very important in sense that it greatly helps to evaluate the results of the previous work and even the future work. If the estimated lower bound exactly matches the actual number in the actual design result, we can say that the result is guaranteed to be optimal. In contrast, if they do not match, the following two cases are expected: we might estimate a better (more exact) lower bound or we find a new synthesis result better than those of the previous work. Our experimental results show that there are some differences between the numbers of micro-registers and our estimated lower bounds. One reason for these differences seems that our estimation tries to estimate the result with the minimum micro-registers among all the possible candidates, regardless of usage of other resources such as LUTs, while the previous work takes into account both LUTs and micro-registers. In addition, it implies that our method may have some limitation on exact estimation due to the complexity of the problem itself in sense that it is much more complicated than LUT estimation and thus needs more improvement, and/or there may exist some other synthesis results better than those of the previous work.