Using Reprogrammable Gate Arrays in Performance-Critical Designs

 

 

Barry Fagin

Thayer School of Engineering

Dartmouth College

Hanover, NH  03755

barry.fagin@dartmouth.edu

603-646-3060

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

 

We describe our experiences with using reprogrammable gate arrays in performance-critical digital systems.  Our experience indicates that RPGAs are easily integrated into the classroom, but are not yet sufficiently mature to permit comparable integration into a research environment.

 

While reprogrammable gate arrays offer the potential for reduced area and chip count, routing and interconnect issues presently detract from their utility as building blocks in high-performance systems.  We believe this is due to asymmetrical advancement rates of hardware and software technology.  We point out the principal difficulties with using reprogrammable gate arrays in performance critical designs, and offer suggestions for improvement.

 

 

1.0 Introduction

 

            We have described in previous work our interest in the rapid prototyping of digital systems at the Thayer School of Engineering [FaHi89].  Programmable gate arrays, a new digital design technology, offer considerable promise in this area.  Reprogrammable devices are of particular interest in a university environment, where the technology is often employed by novice users.

 

            We have attempted to integrate reprogrammable gate arrays into some designs of the Thayer RPF, and describe our results here.  With respect to education, our use of RPGAs has been an unqualified success.  Students design projects of reasonable complexity, becoming familiar with each step of the design process.  They learn a great deal, and are highly motivated at the prospect of having their designs implemented in a matter of minutes.  We believe that this technology will become a standard fixture of university curricula in the years ahead.  Other work presented at this conference discusses the use of PGAs in education; we will not mention it further here.

 

            Instead, we will concentrate on the use of RPGAs in research, specifically in the use of performance critical designs.  We view such designs as hardware experiments that test hypotheses, and thus should be considered research in the strongest scientific sense.   In this area, our enthusiasm for RPGA technology is much more guarded.  The area reduction and chip count reduction promises of RPGA manufacturers seem well-founded, but critical performance issues remain.  The unpredictability of routing delays and the modest capabilities of existing routing software virtually necessitate hand routing for performance critical designs.

 

            We believe it is now time for industry to shift its focus, from hardware technology to system development.  We offer evidence in support of these claims, and make suggestions for improvement.

 

 

2.0 Reprogrammable Gate Arrays

 

            For readers unfamiliar with reprogrammable gate array technology, we present a short overview here.  Much of what follows can be found in [Fr88].  A good introduction to the technology can be obtained from any field programmable gate array manufacturer.  Readers familiar with reprogrammable gate arrays may skip this section.

 

            User-programmable gate arrays can best be viewed as a point on a continuum of programmable logic devices.  Gate arrays present one extreme, providing the designer with a large number of gates laid out in a regular fashion on a silicon substrate.  The function of the gate array is determined by how the gates are connected.  The actual design is seldom carried out at the gate level; designers use macros for higher level building blocks that are then translated into the appropriate interconnect patterns by support software.  Gate arrays offer upwards of 100,000 gates, permitting the development of extremely powerful designs.  This power comes at the price of decreased flexibility: gate arrays are programmed by the manufacturer using photolithography, an expensive and time-consuming process.  Thus these devices are best suited for high-volume, full-custom designs.

 

            PALs, PLAs, and PROMs represent another extreme, offering increased flexibility at the expense of functionality.  Like gate arrays, these devices present the user with a fixed structure whose function is determined by interconnect patterns.  Most PALs and PLAs contain around 100 gates, so their capabilities are limited to simple logic functions.  Programming, however, is easily accomplished by the user, using a variety of standard hardware platforms and software support.  Most PALs and PLAs are write-once devices, while certain types of PROMs are reprogrammable through the use of electrical energy or ultraviolet light.  These devices are referred to as EPROMs.

 

            User-programmable gate arrays, or simply PGAs, represent a compromise between these two extremes, attempting to combine the ease of use and flexibility of smaller programmable devices with the functionality of a gate array.  Like gate arrays, PGAs offer a matrix of digital components and a set of interconnect resources.  The functionality of the gate array is determined by the particular set of interconnect resources utilized.  Unlike gate arrays, however, PGAs permit user programmability of interconnect resources through the use of various proprietary technological advances.  Xilinx Incorporated, for example, uses FETs between interconnect points connected to SRAM cells [Fr88].  These cells are programmed from an off-chip bit stream at powerup, which then determines the functionality of the design.  These devices are reprogrammable; we refer to them as RPGAs.  Actel Corporation, on the other hand, uses high voltage programming pulses to breakdown dielectric material between two points; contact points that are unpulsed remain unconnected.  This technique eliminates the space associated with the SRAM cell, at the cost of  one-time programmability.

 

            The dedicated hardware resources available for interconnect vary from vendor to vendor.  The basic hardware resource on Xilinx gate arrays is the Configurable Logic Block, or CLB.  The number of CLB's required to implement a design is quite important, as we will see shortly.

 

            One possible design cycle using PGAs is shown in Figure 1.  A schematic capture package is used to create and simulate the design.  (We use the Workview 4.0 CAD package, developed by Viewlogic Incorporated, running on the Sun SPARCstation 1).  Parts of the design are selected for PGA implementation, followed by  placing and routing on the PGA.  Note that at this point the process changes from one supported by a CAD vendor to one supported by a PGA vendor. 

 

            After the design has been placed and routed, hand massaging of the results may be necessary to meet performance criteria.  (In fact, it has been our experience that hand routing is always necessary to meet performance specs.  We will say more about this shortly).  The resulting design must then be backannotated and resimulated, so that the new propagation times and electrical information obtained as a result of the route can be incorporated into the design.  If performance specs are met, the PGA may then be configured, debugged, and integrated into the system.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 1: PGA Design Cycle

 

            Our experience at the Thayer RPF indicates that the single largest bottleneck in the design process occurs at boxes 4 and 5: the place, route, and "fine-tune" sections of the PGA design process.  To better understand why this is so, we turn to a short description of two high-performance digital systems designed at the Thayer RPF: a hardware monitor for the 68000, and a Fast Hartley Transform Processor.

 


3.0 High Performance Digital Designs at the Thayer RPF

 

  3.1 A Hardware Monitor for the 68000

 

            For computer architecture to be credible as a scientific discipline, it should be characterized by repeatable experiments.  Trace-driven simulation is one good way to perform such experiments, but experimental trace data are scarce.  In an effort to improve this state of affairs, we have designed a hardware monitor for the 68000 at the Thayer RPF.  The monitor is designed to fit into the expansion slot of the Macintosh SE, although it can be interfaced to any 680x0-based system.  A block diagram of the monitor is shown below:

 

 

 

 

Figure 2: 68000 Hardware Monitor

 

 

            We first developed a prototype version of this design as a wire-wrapped TTL board, and verified that it functioned correctly.  Our ultimate goal, however, was a design with both more functionality and less area: one that could fit inside a Macintosh SE.  Since the area for extra boards inside an SE is extremely limited, we looked to programmable gate arrays as a way to reduce area, chip count, and power consumption. 

 

  3.2 A Fast Hartley Transform Processor

 

            We have also designed a special purpose processor that computes the Fast Hartley Transform, or FHT.  The FHT is similar to the FFT in many respects, including its computational structure and the existence of a convolution theorem.  It differs from the FFT in that it is real valued, requiring half the memory and half the time of the FFT.  The FHT exhibits a unique addressing pattern, shown below in Figure 3 for a 16-point transform.  For more information on the FHT, the reader is referred to [KwSh86].


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 3: Butterfly Diagram for 16-point FHT

 

 

            The system block diagram for the FHT processor is shown in Figure 4.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 4: FHT Processor

            Although most FHT butterflies require three inputs points to generate two output points, our processor exploits a novel address generation scheme to generate two overlapping butterflies simultaneously, allowing the processor to produce four output points from four input points.  The actual data points are calculated in the Butterfly Control Unit (BCU), a five-stage pipelined processor shown in Figure 5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 5: Butterfly Control Unit

 

            The FHT processor is considerably more complex than the hardware monitor; implementing the processor using SSI and MSI parts would require over a hundred IC's, an extremely ambitious implementation effort.  To reduce system complexity and design time, we once again turned to programmable gate arrays. 

 

            We note that both of these designs are performance-critical, in the sense that if they do not meet specs there is little value in building them.  The hardware monitor must capture events in real time on the 68000 bus; if the critical path through the design is so long that bus transactions are missed, the system is useless.  While the FHT processor has no external performance constraints, it retains all the engineering requirements of a special-purpose processor.  Special-purpose systems must offer extremely high performance in order to compete effectively with more general-purpose devices.

 

 

4.0 Design Experiences Using RPGA's

 

  4.1 The Hardware Monitor

            Our exploration of the hardware monitor design space is shown in Figure 6:

 

 

 

 

Figure 6: Hardware Monitor Design Space


            We first attempted to utilize a single small PGA, but encountered pin limitations.  We then examined a larger PGA with sufficient I/O bandwidth, but the resulting route proved unacceptable.  Complete routing by hand was also considered, but rejected due to insufficient design time.

 

            Rather than attempt to tune the existing route, we chose instead to split the design into control and datapath sections.  We first attempted to partition the design into 2 PGAs, hoping to trade off the extra area for the savings in design time from an automatically generated route.  Unfortunately, the resulting routes did not meet performance specs, although they were significantly better.

 

            Upon examining the layout of the datapath PGA, we found that in many cases entire CLB's were dedicated to latches.  We thus began to work on the PGA directly  by replacing many of its latches with registered IOB's, a simpler dedicated hardware resource.  We also noticed that the presence of bidirectional pins caused the router considerable difficulty, so we removed them from the design at the cost of some additional chips.   Once again, we were willing to trade off area and chip count for a satisfactory route. 

 

            The control section of the design was initially implemented as 4 PALs.  We first attempted to implement the PALs using separate design files, combining them only when the  design was produced.  The resulting route was not acceptable.  We then combined the PALs into a single design, using software utilities to combine PAL files and perform logic minimization.  We hoped that by minimizing logic across PALs a simpler design would be produced, yielding a better route.  This was not the case.  Since the PALs do not take up that much more area than an RPGA, we decided to leave them as discrete components.

 

4.2 FHT Processor

 

            The FHT Processor is considerably more complex than the hardware monitor, presenting a greater implementation challenge.  The design required a total of 175 CLBs.  The processor divides into three logically distinct sections, with CLB counts as shown in Table 1:

 

Table 1: CLB Allocation in FHT Processor

 

                                             Function                                               #CLBs

 

                                             Control A                                             80

                                             Control B                                             66

                                             Scaling                                                 29

                                             Total                                                    175

 

            We attempted a total of six design alternatives before finally developing a partitioning scheme that met specs.  As we have targeted the Xilinx reprogrammable gate array architecture, we considered all members of the Xilinx 3000 family of RPGAs.  The CLB count of these devices is shown in Table 2 [Xi90].


Table 2: CLB count of Xilinx 3000 Family RPGAs

 

                                             RPGA                           #CLBs

                                            

                                             3020                                    64

                                             3030                                  100

                                             3042                                  144

                                             3064                                  224

                                             3090                                  320

 

         The choices of target gate arrays and the different ways of partitioning the design presented us with a variety of points in the design space to consider.  We examined a total of 6.  These are shown below in order of investigation, along with their reasons for rejection.

 

Table 3: Design Space Points for FHT Processor

 

#       RPGA                                                        REASONS FOR                     COMMENTS

                                                                           REJECTION

 

1       3090                                                          Unacceptable route                   whole design

                                                                                                                           on 1 PGA

         CONTROL A/B          SCALE                                                                  went to 2 PGAs

2       3042                            3020                      Unable to route                         tried larger dev

3       3064                            3020                      Unacceptable route                   tried larger dev

4       3090                            3020                      Unacceptable route                  

 

         CTRL A     CTRL B     SCALE                                                                  went to 3 PGAs

5       3042          3042          3020                      Unacceptable route                  

6       3030          3030          3020                      Unacceptable route,                  better route                                                 but fixable by hand    than larger

                                                                                                                           device!

 

         We first attempted to place the processor on a single device, but ran into pin limitation problems.  We next split the design into two gate arrays, taking a similar approach to the hardware monitor.  As expected, the software was unable to route the design for the 3042, since it contains 144 CLBs while the control section of the processor contains 146.  We were unsure, however, of the effect of logic minimization by the CAD software on CLB count, and felt this option worth a try.

 

            We went to larger devices, hoping that the quality of the route would improve, but were unable to generate a satisfactory route automatically.  We then went to three RPGAs, investigating various die sizes.  We discovered that, contrary to our expectations, attempting to route a design on a die with more CLBs does not necessarily result in a better route.   In most cases, little or no differences were observed, and in some cases the route was worse.  We found this extremely surprising.

 

            We are unsure as to the relation between die size and the quality of the route.  Too small a die size clearly leads to congestion and a scarcity of routing resources.  For large die sizes, however, small designs appear to be spread out to enable I/O signals to reach their pins.  Layouts tend to be sparser, but with longer inter-block delays.

            We finally went back to the smallest devices that gave promising routes, and bypassed the placement phase of the router.  That is, we attached placement attributes to every single CLB, instructed the router to skip its placement phase, ran the router, and then tuned the resulting route by hand.  This approach resulted in a design that met performance specs.  Typical automatic and hand-tuned routes for all 3 RPGAs, along with their critical paths, are shown in the Appendix.

 

 

5.0 Lessons Learned

 

            We have learned several lessons from our attempts to integrate reprogrammable gate arrays into high performance designs.

 

1) For performance-critical designs,  hand routing is virtually mandatory.    Existing routing software, while able to route our designs, was not able to produce routes that met performance specs.  For high performance, state-of-the-art designs, hand tuning is a must.

 

2) Hand routing takes the largest amount of time in the PGA  design cycle.  It is difficult and tedious to route  designs by hand. The use of macros, designed to alleviate the tedious task of gate level design, can be negated  by unsophisticated routing software that forces the designer back down to the gate level to properly tune the system.  

 

3) Going to larger devices does not help.  For both designs, we examined the use of larger devices, believing that providing more hardware resources would relieve routing difficulties.  There was usually no difference.  In fact, we were occasionally  surprised to find that the quality of the route was  worse. 

 

4) The unpredictability of net delays is the single largest barrier to meeting performance specs.   Some delays calculated by routing software were accurate only to within 40%. We do not believe this will ever prove satisfactory for high performance designs.

 

5)  Users should integrate all aspects of the design process on a single platform.  Currently, the only platform for which all aspects of the  design process can be carried out is the IBM PC.  Desiring a higher-performance environment, we opted for the Sun/4 with the hopes that the technology would eventually be migrated to a workstation.  Currently, we run Workview on a Sun/4, place and route on a Sun/3, and hand edit designs on a PC.  While transferring designs from our Sun/4's to Sun/3's requires only an ftp, transferring to a PC is a bit more involved.  With our present setup,  design transfer requires 1) ftp'ing to a PC/RT running AOS, 2) performing a DOSwrite to transfer the design to a floppy, and 3) transferring the floppy to the PC that runs the  software.  As these three machines are all located in different rooms, this is rather inconvenient.

 

            We suspect this inconvenience will be temporary, since it is merely an artifact of the temporary unavailability of a complete system on a single hardware platform and the peculiarities of our laboratory environment.  We note that Xilinx is working on porting all its software to the Sun/3 and 4, and may have released the product by the time this paper is presented.   We hope this is true, and strongly encourage users of PGA software to develop design environments on a single hardware platform.  This saves considerable time and aggravation.

 

6) Watch out for incompatibilities between vendors.  Since gate arrays and schematic capture packages are usually made by different companies, PGA designers will find themselves using software supplied by two different vendors.  The inter-vendor interface is crossed when schematics and wirelists are converted into PGA designs, and again when  designs are incorporated back into schematics for simulation.  Despite the existence of open standards to facilitate clean, error-free software, we have discovered at least two vendor-based incompatibilities that have caused considerable annoyance.  Both relate to signal naming, concerning the use of '/' versus '\' and the location of '-'  to indicate active low signals.  These mistakes are relatively subtle, but should have been detected by rudimentary beta-test procedures before being released on an unsuspecting user community.

 

 

6.0 Conclusions

 

            We are witnessing the emergence of a  new technology, one with significant potential to alter the way microsystem education and research are performed.  Existing industrial efforts for the past few years have focused on hardware issues , in what we believe was a correct initial emphasis of design focus.  The resulting technology in its present state is well suited to microsystems education, where it has the potential to make a valuable contribution in the classroom.

 

            It is now time, we believe, for the next step in RPGA evolution: its emergence as a design system.  RPGA technology is now sufficiently mature for educational purposes, but is still too young for use in research-oriented, performance critical experimentation.  Universities and the user community can help the technology to grow  by insisting that industry treat RPGA's as a system,  and not simply an interesting piece of hardware.  Current industrial  emphasis on hardware at the expense of software limits the utility of RPGA's in high performance designs.  The relative unsophistication of RPGA software,  for example,  virtually requires designers to route by hand to meet performance specs.  This will come as a shock to engineers who have chosen RPGA's to reduce design time.  If the full promise of RPGA technology is to be realized, industry  must now redirect its energies away from devices and toward device environments.

 

            We hope that the intent of this paper will not be misconstrued.  Manufacturers of reprogrammable gate arrays have expended considerable effort in developing a reconfigurable device with a reasonably high level of integration.  This is a significant achievement.  We believe, however, that it is time for industry to move on, to shift its emphasis away from hardware and toward hardware support.  The sophistication of reprogrammable gate arrays has rapidly outpaced the development of tools to manage their complexity. 

 

            Fortunately, this trend is not irreversible.  By developing more intelligent, user-friendly place and route software, and by reducing the uncertainty of interconnect delays, industry can produce a high- performance system,  and not simply a high-performance device.  Such an alteration of emphasis will undoubtedly come with some short term costs.  In the long run, however, we believe it will produce a better product: one that lives up to the potential that this exciting new technology has to offer.

 

 

7.0 Acknowledgements

 

            The author is grateful for the support of Sun Microsystems, Xilinx Incorporated, and Viewlogic Incorporated, all of whom made their products available at little or no cost and backed them with customer support.  The author is particularly grateful to Richard Ravel of Xilinx  for his comments and suggestions.  Much of this work was made possible by the Whitaker Foundation, whose support is gratefully acknowledged.  Thanks as well are due to Jeff Kuskin at Stanford and Adam Erickson at Sequoia Computer Systems for their perseverance and insights into the use of RPGAs in complex digital systems.   Additional support for the Thayer Rapid Prototyping Facility has been provided by the National Science Foundation under grant  #CDA-8921062.

 

            Xilinx Incorporated is presently developing a newer version of its router,  intended to address many of the issues outlined in this paper.  As of this writing, this product was not yet available for testing.   We look forward to its introduction in the marketplace, and hope that it renders many of our concerns obsolete.

 

8.0 References

 

[Er90] Erickson, Adam, "A High Performance Processor to Compute the Fast Hartley Transform Using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays", Master's Thesis, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH.

 

[Fa89] Barry Fagin and Charles Hitchcock, "Rapid Prototyping Without MOSIS: A Minority View", 2nd NSF VLSI Education Conference, pp 59-67, Santa Clara, CA  1989.

 

[FaKu89] Barry Fagin and Jeff Kuskin, "A Hardware Monitor for the MC68000", submitted to IEEE Micro Dec 1989.

 

[Fr88] Ross Freeman, "User-Programmable Gate Arrays", IEEE Spectrum,  pp 32-35, Dec. 1988.

 

[KwSh86] C. P. Kwong and K. P. Shiu, "Structured Fast Hartley Transform Algorithms",  IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing  34-4, Aug 1986.

 

[So85] R. Sorensen et. al., "On Computing the Discrete Hartley Transform", IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing  33-4, Oct. 1985.

 

[Xi90] Xilinx Programmable Gate Array Databook, Xilinx Incorporated, 1990.


APPENDIX

 

 

 

CONTROL A

AUTOROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 120ns

3030 -- 100 CLBs

 

 

 

 

CONTROL A

HAND ROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 60ns

3030 -- 100 CLBs

 

 

 

 

CONTROL B

AUTOROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 91ns

3030 -- 100 CLBs

 

 

 

 

CONTROL B

HAND ROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 51ns

3030 -- 100 CLBs

 

 

 

 

SCALE CONTROL

AUTOROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 71ns

3020 -- 64 CLBs

 

 

 

 

 

SCALE CONTROL

HAND ROUTE

CRITICAL PATH = 57ns

3020 -- 64 CLBs