Implementation of elementary functions for FPGA compute accelerators

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) are growing from the role of glue logic into the area of application acceleration and compute. This is fostered by advances in silicon technologies as well as standards based methodologies for interacting with heterogeneous compute resources. As these standards generally require the implementation of elementary functions, this work outlines the implementation and evaluation of the elementary functions required by the heterogeneous programming standard OpenCL. It outlines the implementation of the math “builtin” functions using CORDIC methods and details the processes that will be taken to benchmark the resource usage, maximum frequency, and latency of each function on Xilinx 7 Series FPGAs. Because of the applicability and standardization of the OpenCL math functions, this benchmarking effort provides a basis for understanding and analysing future implementations.