• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.823-826
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• 2003

FPGA-based logic emulator with lane gate capacity generally comprises a large number of FPGAs connected in mesh or crossbar topology. However, gate utilization of FPGAs and speed of emulation are limited by the number of signal pins among FPGAs and the interconnection architecture of the logic emulator. The time-multiplexing of interconnection wires is required for multi-FPGA system incorporating several state-of-the-art FPGAs. This paper proposes a circuit partitioning algorithm called SCATOMi(SCheduling driven Algorithm for TOMi)for multi-FPGA system incorporating four to eight FPGAs where FPGAs are interconnected through TOMi(Time-multiplexed, Off-chip, Multicasting interconnection). SCATOMi improves the performance of TOMi architecture by limiting the number of inter-FPGA signal transfers on the critical path and considering the scheduling of inter-FPGA signal transfers. The performance of the partitioning result of SCATOMi is 5.5 times faster than traditional partitioning algorithms. Architecture comparison show that the pin count is reduced to 15.2%-81.3% while the critical path delay is reduced to 46.1%-67.6% compared to traditional architectures.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.49 no.8
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• pp.1589-1599
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• 2017

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting more attention in safety-related and safety-critical application development of nuclear power plant instrumentation and control systems. The high logic density and advancements in architectural features make static random access memory (SRAM)-based FPGAs suitable for complex design implementations. Devices deployed in the nuclear environment face radiation particle strike that causes transient and permanent failures. The major reasons for failures are total ionization dose effects, displacement damage dose effects, and single event effects. Different from the case of space applications, soft errors are the major concern in terrestrial applications. In this article, a review of radiation effects on FPGAs is presented, especially soft errors in SRAM-based FPGAs. Single event upset (SEU) shows a high probability of error in the dependable application development in FPGAs. This survey covers the main sources of radiation and its effects on FPGAs, with emphasis on SEUs as well as on the measurement of radiation upset sensitivity and irradiation experimental results at various facilities. This article also presents a comparison between the major SEU mitigation techniques in the configuration memory and user logics of SRAM-based FPGAs.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.601-606
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• 2017

SRAM-based FPGAs mainly used to develop and implement high-performance circuits have SRAM-type configuration memory. Soft errors in memory devices are the main threat from a reliability point of view. Soft errors occurring in the configuration memory of FPGAs cause FPGAs to malfunction. SEM(Soft Error Mitigation) Controllers offered by Xilinx can mitigate the influence of soft errors in configuration memory. SEM Controllers use ECC(Error Correction Code) and CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Code) which are placed around the configuration memory to detect and correct the errors. The correction is done through a partial reconfiguration process. This paper presents the availability analysis of SRAM-based FPGAs against soft errors under the protection of SEM Controllers. Availability functions were derived and compared according to the correction capability of SEM Controllers of several different families of FPGAs. The result may help select an SRAM-based FPGA part and estimate the availability of FPGAs running in an environment where soft errors occur.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.8
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• pp.2952-2965
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• 2023

Advanced reactors, such as Small Modular Reactors or existing Nuclear Power Plants, often use Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based controllers in new Instrumentation and Control (I&C) system architectures or as an alternative to existing analog-based I&C systems. Compared to CPU-based Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), FPGAs offer better overall performance. However, programming functions on FPGAs can be challenging due to the requirement for a hardware description language that does not explicitly support the operation of real numbers. This study aims to implement the Reactor Trip (RT) functions of the existing analog-based Reactor Protection System (RPS) using FPGAs. The RT equations for Overtemperature delta Temperature and Overpower delta Temperature involve dynamic compensators expressed with the Laplace transform variable, 's', which is not directly supported by FPGAs. To address this issue, the trip equations with the Laplace variable in the continuous-time domain are transformed to the discrete-time domain using the Z-transform. Additionally, a new operation based on a relative value for the equation range is introduced for the handling of real numbers in the RT functions. The proposed approach can be utilized for upgrading the existing analog-based RPS as well as digitalizing control systems in advanced reactor systems.

• The Journal of Korean Association of Computer Education
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.99-105
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• 2013

The FPGA-based emulation is an essential step in ASIC design for validation. For emulation with maximal frequency, it is crucial to understand the FPGA characteristics. This paper attempts to analyze the performance characteristics of the modern FPGAs from renowned vendors, Xilinx and Altera, with a case study utilizing various adders and MIPS CPU. Unlike the common wisdom, ripple-carry adder (RCA) does not utilize the inherent carry-chain inside FPGAs when structurally designed based on 1-bit adders. Thus, the RCA shows the inferior performance to the other types of adders in FPGAs. Our study also reveals that FPGAs from Xilinx exhibit different characteristics from the ones from Altera. That is, the prefix adder, which is optimized for speed in ASIC design, shows the poor performance on Xilinx devices, whereas it provides a comparable speed to the IP core on Altera devices. It suggests that error-prone manual change of the original design can be avoided on Altera devices if area is permitted. Experiments with MIPS CPU confirm the arguments.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2003.04c
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• pp.283-285
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• 2003

We have developed an optimization algorithm based formulation for performing efficient time driven simultaneous place and route for FPGAS. Field programmable gate array(FPGAS) provide of drastically reducing the turn-around time for digital ICs, with a relatively small degradation in performance. For a variety of application specific Integrated circuit application, where time-to-market is most critical and the performance requirement do not mandate a custom or semicustom approach, FPGAS are an increasingly popular alternative. This has prompted a substantial amount of specialized synthesis and layout research focused on maximizing density, minimizing delay, and minimizing design time.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07b
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• pp.1276-1279
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• 2002

In order to satisfy the requirement for various applications in an electronic device, many dynamically reconfigurable systems such as FPGAs have been used recently. This paper presents a pipelined scheduling for dynamically reconfigurable systems based on FPGAs. For reconfigurable systems conventional schedulings have reduced processing time by minimizing the number of reconfigurations. However, they are not effective enough for applications including many iterative processes such as digital signal processing. Our approach has been able to increase throughput of iterative applications on dynamically reconfigurable systems by using pipelined scheduling.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.1161-1164
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• 2003

We have developed an optimization algorithm based formulation for performing efficient time driven simultaneous place and route for FPGAs. Field programmable gate array(FPGAs) provide of drastically reducing the turn-around time for digital ICs, with a relatively small degradation in performance. For a variety of application specific integrated circuit application, where time-to-market is most critical and the performance requirement do not mandate a custom or semicustom approach, FPGAs are an increasingly popular alternative. This has prompted a substantial amount of specialized synthesis and layout research focused on maximizing density, minimizing delay, and minimizing design time.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• summer
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• pp.70-73
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• 2004

We have developed an optimization algorithm based formulation for performing efficient time driven simultaneous place and route for FPGAs. Field programmable gate array (FPGAs) provide of drastically reducing the turn-around time for digital ICs, with a relatively small degradation in performance. For a variety of application specific integrated circuit application, where time-to-market is most critical and the performance requirement do not mandate a custom or semicustom approach, FPGAs are an increasingly popular alternative. This has prompted a substantial amount of specialized synthesis and layout research focused on maximizing density, minimizing delay, and minimizing design time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2002.10c
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• pp.721-723
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• 2002

본 논문에서는 최근 수요가 급격히 증가하고 있는 FPGA의 전력 소모 특성을 분석하기 위해서 개발한 측성 시스템(SECF : Seoul National University Energy Characterizer FPGAs)의 구성 및 동작 방법을 설명하고 있다. 또한 이 시스템을 이용하여 몇 가지의 간단한 실험을 통해 FPGA 전력 소모 경향을 살펴보는 것을 그 목적으로 한다.