An Independent Analysis of Floating-point DSP Design Flow and Performance on Altera 28-nm FPGAs

OVERVIEW FPGAs are increasingly used as parallel processing engines for demanding digital signal processing applications. Benchmark results show that on highly parallelizable workloads, FPGAs can achieve higher performance and superior cost/performance compared to digital signal processors (DSPs) and general-purpose CPUs. However, to date, FPGAs have been used almost exclusively for fixed-point DSP designs. FPGAs have not been viewed as an effective platform for applications requiring high-performance floating-point computations. FPGA floating-point efficiency and performance has been limited due to long processing latencies and routing congestion. In addition, the traditional FPGA design flow, based on writing register-transfer-level hardware descriptions in Verilog or VHDL, is not well suited to implementing complex floating-point algorithms. Altera has developed a new floating-point design flow intended to streamline the process of implementing floating-point digital signal processing algorithms on Altera FPGAs, and to enable those designs to achieve higher performance and efficiency than previously possible. Rather than building a datapath consisting of elementary floating-point operators (for example, multiplication followed by addition followed by squaring), the floating-point compiler generates a fused datapath that combines elementary operators into a single function or datapath. In doing so, it eliminates the redundancies present in traditional floating-point FPGA designs. In addition, the Altera design flow is a high-level, model-based design flow using Altera's DSP Builder Advanced Blockset with MATLAB and Simulink from MathWorks. Altera expects that by working at a high level, FPGA designers will be able to implement and verify complex floating-point algorithms more quickly than would be possible with traditional HDL-based design. BDTI performed an independent analysis of Altera's floating-point DSP design flow. BDTI's objective was to assess the performance that can be obtained on Altera FPGAs for demanding floating-point DSP applications, and to evaluate the ease-of-use of Altera's floating-point DSP design flow. This paper presents BDTI's findings, along with background and methodology details.