CEG5010 Reconfigurable Computing

Lecture Notes

• Wk 1 Introduction (pdf)
  A good overview of reconfigurable computing is K. Compton and S. Hauck, "Reconfigurable Computing: A Survey of Systems and Software," ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 34, No. 2. pp. 171-210. June 2002 (link)
• Wk 2 Architecture (pdf)
  This lecture is based on E. Ahmed and J. Rose, "The Effect of LUT and Cluster Size on Deep-Submicron FPGA Performance and Density," IEEE Trans. on VLSI, Vol 12, No. 3, March 2004, pp. 288-298.
• Wk 3 Interconnect (pdf)
  This lecture is based on G. Lemieux, E. Lee, M. Tom, and A. Yu, "Directional and Single-Driver Wires in FPGA Interconnect", IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology, Brisbane, Australia, pp. 41-48, December 2004
• Wk 4 Finite State Machines (pdf) and ASICs vs FPGAs (pdf)
  A good VHDL tutorial is available from "Actel HDL Coding Style Guide." In particular, read "Technology Independent Coding Styles."
• Wk 5 A UART as an example of a FSM. Notes will be handed out in class.
• Wk 6 Chinese New Year.
• Wk 7 Shift Registers, LFSRs and Random Number Generators (pdf)
  This lecture is based on Peter Alfke, "Efficient Shift Registers, LFSR Counters and Long Pseudo-Random Sequence Generators," Xilinx XAPP052.
• Wk 8 Midterm exam. This will cover all of the material presented in lectures and tutorials except for the physical random number generator and generalised LFSR (note that midterm marks are not counted in your final grade). You can bring any printed or handwritten notes into the exam (open-note exam) and it will be held 9:30-11am (90 minutes in length).
• Wk 9 Elliptic Curve Cryptography (pdf)
  This lecture is based on Leong and Leung, A Microcoded Elliptic Curve Processor using FPGA Technology.
• Wk 10 Distributed Arithmetic (pdf)
  This lecture is based on White, Applications of distributed arithmetic (DA) to digital signal processing: a tutorial review.
• Wk 11 Electronic Cochlea (pdf) and the Symmetric Table Add Method (pdf)
  The cochlea is used as an example of how DA can be combined with module generation.
  The STAM lecture is based on The Symmetric Table Addition Method for Accurate Function Approximation. Here is a link to their website which has software etc. I had problems compiling it under gcc 3.3 though and made some minor changes. This version works for me under Solaris.
• Wk 12 The Cordic Algorithm (makeup lecture, Tues 18th March, 4:30pm-6:15pm in ERB LT) (pdf)
  This lecture is based on Ray Andraka, A survey of CORDIC algorithms for FPGAs.
• Wk 13 Hardware Compilation (pdf) and Hybrid FPGAs (pdf)
  Lecture is based on Page and Luk, Compiling occam into FPGAs.
• Wk 14 FPGA Architectures (revision) (pdf) and Conclusion (pdf).

References

• Outline of a report
• Old CEG5010 course from 2005 (link)

Administrative

• The project demo will be held in the lab on Wed 23rd April, 10:30am.
• The report is due on Wed 30th April, 5pm (hardcopy + machine readable submitted to Matthew). A 10% per day penalty for late reports will be applied.
• All tutorial information is available here
• Assessment scheme will be 10% tutorials 50% project 40% examination.

Project Suggestion

• Using the Xilinx floating point operators library as primitives, implement single precision versions of elementary functions in the Cephes library. For example, each team could implement:
  • sin/cos
  • log2f, log10f
  • exp
  • tan
  • pow
  We will use area*time^2 to evaluate performance.