Major New Release of Public-Domain FPGA Architecture and CAD

J

Jonathan Rose

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For those interested in FPGA CAD and architecture research, we are
pleased to announce the full release of the Verilog-to-Routing (VTR)
project version 1.0. VTR consists of a suite of CAD tools, circuit
benchmarks, FPGA architectures, and experiment scripts to aid those in
the community to explore new FPGAs as well as algorithms to map to
future FPGAs. This effort is an international collaboration of
researchers, and consists of three software tools: ODIN II for
Verilog Elaboration, ABC (from Berkeley) for Logic Synthesis, and VPR
for packing, placement, routing and timing analysis.

You can find detailed information on the new release here:

http://code.google.com/p/vtr-verilog-to-routing/

This new full release has many new features and has been extensively
tested. It is also worth noting that all three tools are Open Source.
In particular, that is now true of VPR, which is new.

This new version of VTR is now fully timing driven in the packing,
place and routing phase of VPR. The previous, alpha release (which
was not timing-driven), enabled the description of far more complex
logic blocks, including the popular Fracturable blocks (such as LUTs
than can operate as one big LUT or two smaller LUTs) in modern
commercial FPGAs. There is also explicit support for hard memories
and multipliers from the Verilog level on down.

This release contains architecture files and benchmark circuits that
make use of Fracturable LUTs, memories and multipliers. The set of
benchmark circuits in this release are from real applications many of
which contain multipliers and memories. The largest of these circuits
is almost 100,000 6-LUTs. In additional to these benchmarks, we also
included the old MCNC circuits as well as a set of circuits that use
embedded floating-point cores.

We provide CAD/Architecture scripts that show how to run various
experiments. As good science needs to be repeatable, we have included
our results so that users of VTR can easily replicate the same results
that we obtained.

We made a strong effort to make a more user friendly build experience.
Building VTR should be as simple as entering make in the main
directory. Testing the flow should be as easy as running a script
that reports what successfully built and what did not.

If you are interested in downloading VTR or getting more information
about it, please visit our website here:

http://code.google.com/p/vtr-verilog-to-routing/

The VTR development team:

University of Toronto: Jason Luu, Jason Anderson, Vaughn Betz, Opal
Densmore, Cong Wang, Peter Milankov, Jonathan Rose
University of New Brunswick: Kenneth B. Kent, Ash Furrow, Paddy
O'Brien, Joey Libby, Shubham Jain, Konstantin Nasartschuk, Andrew
Somerville

University of British Columbia: Jeff Goeders, Eddie Hung

U. Penn: Rafi Rubin

U Miami, Ohio: Peter Jamieson

City University of Hong Kong: Chi Wai Yu

(Many thanks to Robert Brayton and Alan Mischenko at U.C. Berkeley for
the use of the ABC Logic Synthesis tool).
 

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