FPGA Pipeline Synthesis Design Exploration Using Module Selection and Resource Sharing

The primary goal during synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) circuits is to minimize the hardware area while meeting a minimum throughput constraint. In field-programmable gate array (FPGA) implementations, significant area savings can be achieved by using slower, more area-efficient circuit modules and/or by time-multiplexing faster, larger circuit modules. Unfortunately, manual exploration of this design space is impractical. In this paper, we introduce a design exploration methodology that identifies the lowest cost FPGA pipelined implementation of an untimed synchronous data-flow graph by combined module selection with resource sharing under the context of pipeline scheduling. These techniques are applied together to minimize the area cost of the FPGA implementation while meeting a user-specified minimum throughput constraint. Two different algorithms are introduced for exploring the large design space. We show that even for small DSP algorithms, combining these techniques can offer significant area savings relative to applying any of them alone