Professor
Computer Systems Lab (CSL)
Hardware and Embedded Systems (HES) Team
Electronics and Embedded Systems (ELIS) Department
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

 

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Will FPGA reconfiguration change the synthesis problem?

Friday, 11 December 2015 at 14:40 in room BC 420

 

Abstract:

The modern capabilities of FPGAs to be partially reconfigured during their operation open up possibilities for Dynamic Circuit Specialisation (DCS). In a DCS approach, circuits are dynamically optimized for a certain time interval where part of their inputs, called parameters, have constant values. Whenever the parameter values change, the FPGA is reconfigured to a new optimized implementation. In such a scheme, parameter inputs have a different influence on the circuit implementation than regular (streaming) inputs. Currently, the parameterized reconfiguration approach only differs from a regular implementation from the technology mapping on and uses the same synthesis approach as before. But is this the best solution? Should we think about a new synthesis problem where different classes of inputs exist? Will synthesis with reconfiguration in mind differ significantly with synthesis as we know it?
 

About the speaker:

Dirk Stroobandt obtained the Ph.D. degree in electrotechnical engineering from the Ghent University in 1998. Until 2002, he was post-doctoral fellow with the Fund for Scientific Research - Flanders (Belgium) (F.W.O.) and since then is Professor at Ghent University (Full Professor since 2014), affiliated with the Department of Electronics and Information Systems (ELIS), Computer Systems Lab (CSL). He currently leads the research group HES (Hardware and Embedded Systems) of about 10 people with interests in semi-automatic hardware design methodologies and tools, run-time FPGA reconfiguration, and reconfigurable multiprocessor networks.

Dirk Stroobandt is a member of IEEE and ACM. He is the inaugural winner of the ACM/SIGDA Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award in Design Automation, June 1999. He also received the `Scientific prize Alcatel Bell' in 2002. He visited the lab of Prof. Fadi J. Kurdahi at the University of California at Irvine as a researcher from April to July 1997. From July 1999 to June 2000, he visited the group of Prof. Andrew B. Kahng at the Computer Science Department of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) as a post-doctoral researcher.

Dirk Stroobandt initiated and co-organized the International Workshop on System-Level Interconnect Prediction (SLIP) in 1999 and was the General Chair of SLIP 2000. He also was General Chair of IWLS (International Workshop on Logic Synthesis) in 2014 and Program Chair in 2015. He is guest editor of several special issues and has been associate editor of ACM's TODAES for three years and for ACM TRETS since 2015. Dirk Stroobandt is involved in the organisation of several conferences in the field and is reviewer for numerous conferences and journals.

Since 2014, Dirk Stroobandt is chair of the educational committee for the electrical engineering courses at Ghent University. He is also the representative of Ghent University in DSP Valley and member of the Board of DSP Valley.