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Timing-Driven Titan: Enabling Large Benchmarks and Exploring the Gap between Academic and Commercial CAD

Published:25 March 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Benchmarks play a key role in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architecture and CAD research, enabling the quantitative comparison of tools and architectures. It is important that these benchmarks reflect modern large-scale systems that make use of heterogeneous resources; however, most current FPGA benchmarks are both small and simple. In this artile, we present Titan, a hybrid CAD flow that addresses these issues. The flow uses Altera’s Quartus II FPGA CAD software to perform HDL synthesis and a conversion tool to translate the result into the academic Berkeley Logic Interchange Format (BLIF). Using this flow, we created the Titan23 benchmark set, which consists of 23 large (90K--1.8M block) benchmark circuits covering a wide range of application domains. Using the Titan23 benchmarks and an enhanced model of Altera’s Stratix IV architecture, including a detailed timing model, we compare the performance and quality of VPR and Quartus II targeting the same architecture. We found that VPR is at least 2.8 × slower, uses 6.2 × more memory, 2.2 × more wire, and produces critical paths 1.5 × slower compared to Quartus II. Finally, we identified that VPR’s focus on achieving a dense packing and an inability to take apart clusters is responsible for a large portion of the wire length and critical path delay gap.

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          • Published in

            cover image ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
            ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems  Volume 8, Issue 2
            Special Section on FPL 2013
            April 2015
            129 pages
            ISSN:1936-7406
            EISSN:1936-7414
            DOI:10.1145/2746532
            • Editor:
            • Steve Wilton
            Issue’s Table of Contents

            Copyright © 2015 ACM

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 25 March 2015
            • Accepted: 1 April 2014
            • Revised: 1 February 2014
            • Received: 1 December 2013
            Published in trets Volume 8, Issue 2

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