Abstract

Yixin Xu, Zijian Zhao, Yi Xiao, Tongguang Yu, Halid Mulaosmanovic, Dominik Kleimaier, Stefan Duenkel, Sven Beyer, Xiao Gong, Rajiv Joshi, Xiaobo Hu, Shixian Wen, Amanda Sofie Rios, Kiran Lekkala, Laurent Itti, Eric Homan, Sumitha George, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Kai Ni, Ferroelectric FET-based context-switching FPGA enabling dynamic reconfiguration for adaptive deep learning machines, Science Advances, Vol. 10, No. 3, p. eadk1525, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Jan 2024. [2023 impact factor: 11.7] (Cited by 5)

Abstract: Field programmable gate array (FPGA) is widely used in the acceleration of deep learning applications because of its reconfigurability, flexibility, and fast time-to-market. However, conventional FPGA suffers from the trade-off between chip area and reconfiguration latency, making efficient FPGA accelerations that require switching between multiple configurations still elusive. Here, we propose a ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET)–based context-switching FPGA supporting dynamic reconfiguration to break this trade-off, enabling loading of arbitrary configuration without interrupting the active configuration execution. Leveraging the intrinsic structure and nonvolatility of FeFETs, compact FPGA primitives are proposed and experimentally verified. The evaluation results show our design shows a 63.0%/74.7% reduction in a look-up table (LUT)/connection block (CB) area and 82.7%/53.6% reduction in CB/switch box power consumption with a minimal penalty in the critical path delay (9.6%). Besides, our design yields significant time savings by 78.7 and 20.3% on average for context-switching and dynamic reconfiguration applications, respectively.

Themes: Computer Vision, Machine Learning