CIE Components in Electronics
Achronix has announces the availability of Speedcore custom blocks for its eFPGA IP solutions. Achronix Speedcore eFPGAs accelerate data intensive AI / machine learning, 5G wireless, automotive ADAS, datacentre and networking applications. Speedcore custom blocks massively improve performance, power, and area; and enable functionality that has never before been possible in standalone FPGAs. With Speedcore custom blocks, customers gain ASIC efficiency while retaining FPGA flexibility. This results in a highly efficient implementation that minimises power and area while maximising data throughput.
Traditional CPU-based architectures are not scaling to meet the exponential growth in compute demand that is required by the new wave of intelligent data-intensive applications. This is driving the need for new, heterogeneous compute architectures with programmable hardware accelerators. Speedcore eFPGAs deliver the highest-performance and lowest-cost hardware acceleration. Now with Speedcore custom blocks, functions that traditionally ran slowly and consumed significant resources in standalone FPGA fabrics are optimised for maximum performance and minimal die area as illustrated in the following examples.
- The area of a CNN-based YOLO object recognition algorithm was reduced by over 40 per cent by optimising the DSP and memory blocks for matrix multiplication.
- Large string search functions that require parallel comparator arrays resulted in area reduction of over 90 per cent when implemented in Speedcore custom blocks.
- Barrel shifters and bit manipulation structures can be fully implemented in Speedcore custom blocks allowing larger, sophisticated applications in the same area and increasing achievable frequency.
- The core functionality of a 400 Gbps packet processing data-path running at 800 MHz is implemented in Speedcore custom blocks with the programmable logic managing the analysis and control functionality. Today’s standalone FPGAs cannot support this high throughput for packet processing applications.
“Industry leaders are excited about Speedcore custom blocks and the potential they offer,” said Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing, Achronix Semiconductor. “The companies that we are working with are building the next generation of heterogeneous compute platforms and high bandwidth communication systems. They are building high-performance hardware accelerators that can be changed over time as their compute algorithms evolve. Achronix eFPGA IP, now with Speedcore custom blocks, allows them to have programmability with ASIC-level performance and die-size efficiency.”
Speedcore custom blocks definition
Speedcore custom blocks are defined collaboratively by Achronix with its customers through a detailed architecture analysis of acceleration workloads. Repeated functions that are performance and/or area bottlenecks are evaluated as candidates to be hardened into Speedcore custom blocks. A new release of ACE design tools that includes the new Speedcore eFPGA with custom blocks is then provided to customers for benchmarking and evaluation. If required, the process is iterated to create the optimal solution for the customer’s system.
