OrFPGA: An Empirical Performance Tuning Tool for FPGA Designs

With the capacity and performance of FPGAs suitable for space borne applications continuously increasing, the design of FPGAs is becoming increasingly complex involving trading off or simultaneous optimization of space, speed, and power. RNET and ANL are proposing to develop software infrastructure that facilitates automatic performance tuning of FPGAs in terms of speed, power, and size. We introduce an extensible empirical tuning tool system OrFPGA, which is aimed at improving both performance and productivity by enabling FPGA designers to create simple scripts that trigger various FPGA performance optimizations for a specific design. OrFPGA will generate various tuned versions of the same design with different designer parameters and evaluates the versions to select the best performing one for production use. The proposed work will leverage an existing performance tuning tool named Orio developed by ANL for empirical tuning of compute-intensive kernels for a given architecture.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are widely used by NASA for space borne applications. The radiation hardened capabilities, high reliability, and the low power requirements make the FPGAs preferable for Flight Computing systems. The proposed tool provides a software infrastructure that facilitates automatic performance tuning of FPGAs in terms of speed, power, and size.

Other potential applications include DoD and Homeland Security, Prime Contractors that build space-borne systems that require FPGAs, and Processor hardware manufacturers, such as, Intel and AMD.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.