• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.4
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• pp.15-25
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• 2012

The research on the FPGA CAD tools in academia has been lacking practicality due to the underlying FPGA fabric architecture which is too simple and inefficient to be applied for commercial FPGAs. Recently, the database of placement positions and routing graphs on commercial FPGA architectures has been built, and provided for enabling the academic development of placement and routing tools. To extend the limit of academic CAD tools even further, we have developed the evaluation toolkit for the K-FPGA architecture which is under development. By providing interface for exchanging data with a commercial FPGA toolkit at every step of mapping, packing, placement and routing in the tool chain, the toolkit enables individual tools to be developed without waiting for the results of the preceding step, and with no dependency on the quality of the results, and compared in detail with commercial tools at any step. Also, the fabric primitive library is developed by extracting the prototype from a reporting file of a commercial FPGA, restructuring it, and modeling the behavior of basic gates. This library can be used as the benchmarking target, and a reference design for new FPGA architectures. Since the architecture is described in a standard HDL which is familiar with hardware designers, and read in the tools rather than hard coded, the tools are "data-driven", and tolerable with the architectural changes due to the design space exploration. The experiments confirm that the developed library is correct, and the functional correctness of applications implemented on the FPGA fabric can be validated by simulation. The placement and routing tools are under development. The completion of the toolkit will enable the development of practical FPGA architectures which, in return, will synergically animate the research on optimization CAD tools.

• Polymer(Korea)
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.144-149
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• 2014

Large residual stresses are remained in the conventional injection molded products because of the high cavity pressure in packing phase during injection molding process. Conventional injection molding (CIM) invokes distribution of cavity pressure and it has a limitation to obtain product with uniform physical property. Multi-cavity conventional injection molding contains quality deviation among the cavities since flow imbalance occurs during filling phase. Injection compression molding (ICM) is adopted to overcome these limitations of CIM. In this study, molding characteristics of CIM and ICM have been investigated using multi-cavity injection mold. Researches were performed by both experiment and computer simulation through observations of birefringence for transparent resins, polycarbonate and polystyrene in CIM and ICM. As a result, low and uniform birefringence and mold shrinkage were showed in the specimens by ICM that could give a uniform cavity pressure. Deviation of physical property among the specimens in multi-cavity mold shown in CIM was significantly reduced in the specimens by ICM. Through this study it was concluded that the ICM in multi-cavity molding was valid for molding products with uniform property in an individual cavity and also reduced property deviation among the cavities.