Automatic Generation of a Shared Hardware Design for Multiple Application Circuits
Muhammad Mazher Iqbal, Husain Parvez · Frontiers of Information Technology · 2015
Many digital systems provide multiple but similar functionalities, not all of them are required simultaneously. Dedicated hardware solution for each functionality will waste too much area. This work presents a method to generate an optimized hardware solution for a set of functionalities which will execute only one functionality at a time. This single hardware solution, termed as Multi-Circuit, shares its resources efficiently amongst multiple functionalities. Multi-Circuit is generated by initially mapping a given set of application functionalities on a common reconfigurable platform. Later all the unused logic and routing resources are removed from the reconfigurable hardware. Experiments reveal that Multi-Circuit is upto 43% smaller than the previously proposed technique named ASIF using LUT-4 architecture. Multi-Circuit is upto 89% smaller than its corresponding FPGA.