ZUMA: An Open FPGA Overlay Architecture

This paper presents the ZUMA open FPGA overlay architecture. It is an open-source, cross-compatible embedded FPGA architecture that is intended to overlay on top of an existing FPGA, in essence an ”FPGA-on-an-FPGA.” This approach has a number of benefits, including bitstream compatibility between different vendors and parts, compatibility with open FPGA tool Hows, and the ability to embed some programmable logic into systems on FPGAs without the need for releasing or recompiling the master netlist. These options can enhance design possibilities and improve designer productivity. Previous attempts to map an FPGA architecture into a commercial FPGA have had an area penalty of 100x at best [4]. Through careful architectural and implementation choices to exploit low-level elements of the host architecture, ZUMA reduces this penalty to as low as 40x. Using the VTR (VPR6) academic tool How, we have been able to compile the entire MCNC benchmark suite to ZUMA. We invite authors of other tool Hows to target ZUMA.