Section: Research Program

Multi-softcore on 3D FPGA

From the 2010 Xilinx white paper on FPGAs:

“Unlike a processor, in which architecture of the ALU is fixed and designed in a general-purpose manner to execute various operations, the CLBs (configurable logic blocks ) can be programmed with just the operations needed by the application... The FPGA architecture provides the flexibility to create a massive array of application-specific ALUs..The new solution enables high-bandwidth connectivity between multiple die by providing a much greater number of connections... enabling the integration of massive quantities of interconnect logic resources within a single package”

Softcore processors are processors implemented using hardware synthesis. Proprietary solutions include PicoBlaze, MicroBlaze, Nios, and Nios II; open-source solutions include Leon, OpenRisk, and FC16. The choice is wide and many new solutions emerge, including multi-softcore implementations on FPGAs. An alternative to softcores are hardware accelerators on FPGAs, which are dedicated circuits that are an order of magnitude faster than softcores. Between these two approaches, there are other various approaches that connect IPs to softcores, in which, the processor's machine-code language is extended, and IP invocations become new instructions. We envisage a new class of softcores (we call them reflective softcores (Hereafter, by reflective system, we mean a system that is able to modify its own structure and behaviour while it is running. A reflective softcore thus dynamically adds, removes, and replaces IPs in the application running on it, and is able to dynamically modify its own program memory, thereby dynamically altering the program it is executing.)), where almost everything is implemented in IPs; only the control flow is assigned to the softcore itself. The partial dynamic reconfiguration of next-generation FPGAs makes such dynamic IP management possible in practice. We believe that efficient reflective softcores on the new 3D-FPGAs should be as small as possible: low-performance generic hardware components (ALU, registers, memory, I/O...) should be replaced by dedicated high-performance IPs.

We are developing a sofcore processor called HoMade (http://www.lifl.fr/~dekeyser/Homade ) following these ideas.

In the multi-reflective softcores that we develop, some softcores will be slaves and others will be masters. Massively parallel dynamically reconfigurable architectures of softcores can thus be envisaged. This requires, additionally, a parallel management of the partial dynamic reconfiguration system. This can be done, for example, on a given subset of softcores: a massively parallel reconfiguration will replace the current replication of a given IP with the replication of a new IP. Thanks to the new 3D-FPGAs this task can be performed efficiently and in parallel using the large number of 3D communication links (Through-Silicon-Vias). Our roadmap for HoMade is to evolve towards this multi-reflective softcore model.