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Third Party CAD Tools for FPGA Design—A Survey of the Current Landscape

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Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11444))

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Abstract

The FPGA community is at an exciting juncture in the development of 3rd party CAD tools for FPGA design. Much has been learned in the past decade in the development and use of 3rd party tools such RapidSmith, Torc, and IceStorm. New independent open-source CAD tool projects are emerging which promise to provide alternatives to existing vendor tools. The recent release of the RapidWright tool suggests that Xilinx itself is interested in enabling the user community to develop new use cases and specialized tools for FPGA design. This paper provides a survey of the current landscape, discusses parts of what has been learned over the past decade in the author’s work with 3rd party CAD tool development, and provides some thoughts on the future.

This work was supported in part by the I/UCRC Program of the National Science Foundation within the NSF center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) under Grant No. 1738550.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Missing from the discussion in this paper are the myriad tools which provide high-level design paradigms and functionality such as domain specific languages or HLS tools. Also missing are tools such as floorplanning tools and PR management tools. Rather, the focus here is on physical design tools, specifically the steps of synthesis through bitstream generation.

  2. 2.

    The Torc tool [19] was developed at approximately the same time as RapidSmith and the two tools are similar in many ways. Interestingly, both tool suites have their roots in a common joint research project between their respective development teams.

  3. 3.

    RapidSmith2, Tincr, and VDI are all available open-source at GitHub.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NSF Center for Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Brent E. Nelson

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  1. Brent E. Nelson
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Correspondence to Brent E. Nelson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Christian Hochberger

  2. Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA

    Brent Nelson

  3. Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Andreas Koch

  4. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Roger Woods

  5. INESC-ID, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Diniz

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Nelson, B.E. (2019). Third Party CAD Tools for FPGA Design—A Survey of the Current Landscape. In: Hochberger, C., Nelson, B., Koch, A., Woods, R., Diniz, P. (eds) Applied Reconfigurable Computing. ARC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11444. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17227-5_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17227-5_25

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