Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China have developed a novel approach to accelerate a critical step in semiconductor design, which could have significant implications for the energy industry’s push towards more efficient and advanced technologies.
The team, led by Xingyu Liu and Wei Zhang, introduced FLEX, an FPGA-CPU accelerator designed to speed up mixed-cell-height legalization tasks. This process is a crucial step in the physical design of integrated circuits, ensuring that all components fit within the designated space and meet specific design rules. The researchers addressed several challenges in this process, focusing on optimizing task assignment between FPGA and CPU, employing multi-granularity pipelining to accelerate the most time-consuming step, and enhancing the cell shifting process.
FLEX demonstrates impressive speedups compared to existing methods. According to the researchers, it achieves up to 18.3x and 5.4x speedups compared to state-of-the-art CPU-GPU and multi-threaded CPU legalizers, respectively. Moreover, FLEX improves legalization quality by 4% and 1% compared to these methods. The improved efficiency in semiconductor design can translate to faster development cycles and more energy-efficient chips, which are vital for the energy industry as it increasingly relies on advanced technologies for monitoring, control, and data analysis.
The practical applications for the energy sector are manifold. Faster and more efficient semiconductor design can lead to improved power management systems, advanced sensors for energy generation and distribution, and more efficient data processing for energy analytics. As the energy industry continues to evolve, the demand for sophisticated and energy-efficient technologies will only grow, making advancements like FLEX increasingly valuable.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the ACM on International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a premier conference in the field of reconfigurable computing. The findings represent a significant step forward in the quest for more efficient and scalable semiconductor design processes, with broad implications for the energy industry and beyond.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.