Generation and exploration of reconfigurable architectures using mathematical programming

The purpose of this paper is to detail a high-level analytical modelling and optimisation environment for mixed-granularity field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The work carried out for the purposes of this study involves the creation of an analytical framework that can be used to optimise the design of a reconfigurable device for a set of benchmarks. The strengths of this approach are the simultaneous placement, module selection and architecture generation. In this paper, the problem is cast as a formal optimisation, and may be solved using existing optimisation tools. In addition, the approach is adapted into an heuristic for larger benchmark sets. The design space is explored by examining the tradeoffs between area, speed and flexibility, and some comparisons to commercial architectures are drawn.