Optimizing Stream Engines for use in eFPGAs on Radiation Hardened SoCs

Abstract

Systems on a Chip (SoCs) are becoming increasingly common for use in most computational domains as heterogeneous hardware architectures prove themselves very efficient and powerful. The space domain is one such example and poses a plethora of challenging design constraints, which become even more pronounced in the context of radiation hardened embedded Field Programmable Gate Arrays (eFPGAs). eFPGAs lend themselves to supporting powerful hardware accelerators (HAs), where data is streamed in by the use of a stream engine. Due to the relatively small amount of programmable logic in eFPGAs, the stream engine supporting the HA must be made as resource efficient as possible. Though, to the best of the authors knowledge, there is no previous work exploring resource optimized stream engines for use on eFPGA. In this thesis, we implement a performance and resource efficient stream engine for eFPGAs. The proposed stream engine – named GANIMEDE – achieved a communication link utilization of 94.5% accounted for protocol overheads while only occupying 2.1% of the total available resources provided by the targeted eFPGA. In addition, this thesis offers a discussion on desirable properties in stream engines and presents parts of supported protocols that should be implemented on the SoC instead of the eFPGA.