FPGA Technology: from Chips to Tools to Systems

The Novel Computing Technologies (NCT) group at Heidelberg University works on mostly technology-focused aspects of reconfigurable computing. Our group maintains the open FABulous eFPGA framework which was used for the tape out of 10 chips so far. With that tool, we designed FPGA fabric clones of established Xilinx and Lattice FPGAs but also new fabrics that use memristor technology for configuration storage. Our GoAhead Partial reconfiguration tool allows the implementation of very adaptive FPGA systems where the FPGA resource utilization can be dynamically adjusted according to runtime requirements and operational conditions in a transparent manner, We use that to build a dynamic database processing system where accelerator modules are plugged together to processing pipelines for accelerating problems, that are only known at runtime. We also develop a security infrastructure that is required to operate FPGAs in data centers, and the talk will show how we crashed over 100 AWS F1 (FPGA) instances. More importantly, the talk will present the FPGADefender virus scanner that helps to prevent such attacks. Note that we vacant positions.

Dirk Koch is a Professor at the Heidelberg University. His main research interests are on run-time reconfigurable systems based 0n FPGAs. embedded systems, computer architecture, VLSI, and hardware security. Dirk developed techniques and tools for self-adaptive distributed embedded control systems based on FPGAs. Current research projects include database acceleration using FPGA-based stream processing, HPC, and exascale computing. as well as reconfigurable instruction set extensions for CPUs and using FPGAs in data centers. Dirk Koch is the author of the book Partial Reconfiguration on FPGAs’and a co-editor of the book “FPGAs for Software Programmers”.