2025/09/22 by Allen Boston, Biruk Seyoum, Boston, Allen +5
Computer Science · Engineering · #Embedded Systems Design Techniques #VLSI and FPGA Design Techniques #Low-power high-performance VLSI design
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.18295
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have evolved from uniform logic arrays into heterogeneous fabrics integrating digital signal processors (DSPs), memories, and specialized accelerators to support emerging workloads such as machine learning. While these enhancements improve power, performance, and area (PPA), they complicate design space exploration and application optimization due to complex resource interactions. To address these challenges, we propose a lightweight profiling methodology inspired by the Roofline model. It introduces three congruence scores that quickly identify bottlenecks related to heterogeneous resources, fabric, and application logic. Evaluated on the Koios and VPR benchmark suites using a Stratix 10 like FPGA, this approach enables efficient FPGA architecture co-design to improve heterogeneous FPGA performance.