SymbiFlow and VPR: An Open-Source Design Flow for Commercial and Novel FPGAs

Abstract

As the benefits of Moore's Law diminish, computing performance, and efficiency gains are increasingly achieved through specializing hardware to a domain of computation.However, this limits the hardware's generality and flexibility. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), microchips which can be reprogrammed to implement arbitrary digital circuits, enable the benefits of specialization while remaining flexible. A challenge to using FPGAs is the complex computer-aided design flow required to efficiently map a computation onto an FPGA. Traditionally, these design flows are closed-source and highly specialized to a particular vendor's devices. We propose an alternate data-driven approach, which uses highly adaptable and retargettable open-source tools to target both commercial and research FPGA architectures. While challenges remain, we believe this approach makes the development of novel and commercial FPGA architectures faster and more accessible. Furthermore, it provides a path forward for industry, academia, and the opensource community to collaborate and combine their resources to advance FPGA technology.

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“…Finally, our outcome results in an all-in-one intuitive and flexible browser-based cloud framework to learn computer architecture and CAD design techniques and tools by interactive examples embedded in an incremental graphical/text browser interface. In future work, we will evaluate open source [24] and cloud computing by using FPGAs [25], [26].…”

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“…This is the only closed source path that was used for emulation. However, an open-source alternative for the FPGA implementation exists as well such as the Symbiflow project [20] or OpenFPGA [21] but that is not the scope of this paper.…”