Document Type
Article
Source of Publication
Electronics (Switzerland)
Publication Date
2-1-2023
Abstract
Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is at the core of System on Chip (SoC) design across various Industry 5.0 digital systems—healthcare devices, farming equipment, autonomous vehicles and aerospace gear to name a few. Given that pre-silicon verification using Computer Aided Design (CAD) accounts for about 70% of the time and money spent on the design of modern digital systems, this paper summarizes the machine learning (ML)-oriented efforts in different FPGA CAD design steps. With the recent breakthrough of machine learning, FPGA CAD tasks—high-level synthesis (HLS), logic synthesis, placement and routing—are seeing a renewed interest in their respective decision-making steps. We focus on machine learning-based CAD tasks to suggest some pertinent research areas requiring more focus in CAD design. The development of open-source benchmarks optimized for an end-to-end machine learning experience, intra-FPGA optimization, domain-specific accelerators, lack of explainability and federated learning are the issues reviewed to identify important research spots requiring significant focus. The potential of the new cloud-based architectures to understand the application of the right ML algorithms in FPGA CAD decision-making steps is discussed, together with visualizing the scenario of incorporating more intelligence in the cloud platform, with the help of relatively newer technologies such as CAD as Adaptive OpenPlatform Service (CAOS). Altogether, this research explores several research opportunities linked with modern FPGA CAD flow design, which will serve as a single point of reference for modern FPGA CAD flow design.
DOI Link
ISSN
Publisher
MDPI AG
Volume
12
Issue
4
Disciplines
Computer Engineering | Computer Sciences
Keywords
CAD design steps, FPGA backend flow, machine learning, placement, routing, synthesis
Scopus ID
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Taj, Imran and Farooq, Umer, "Towards Machine Learning-Based FPGA Backend Flow: Challenges and Opportunities" (2023). All Works. 5729.
https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae/works/5729
Indexed in Scopus
yes
Open Access
yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series