sFPGA2 - A scalable GALS FPGA architecture and design methodology

The interconnection networks used by current fine grain FPGAs are not scalable for very big array sizes. To address this issue, we apply the GALS (Globally Asynchronous and Locally Synchronous) paradigm to build scalable FPGAs. The logic resources are divided into locally synchronous tiles and asynchronous communications among different tiles. To route the asynchronous communications, we build a serial network-on-chip. Targeting streaming applications, we propose a design flow that maps user applications to our new FPGA architecture. To validate our architecture and design flow, we build an emulation prototype and develop a JPEG baseline encoder as the case study. We have successfully demonstrated the concept and predict a maximum frequency of 224MHz for designs mapping to sFPGA2 architecture.