OpenSoC system architect: An open toolkit for building soft-cores on FPGAs

Given the recent difficulty in continuing the classic CMOS manufacturing density and power scaling curves, also known as Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling, respectively, we find that modern complex system architectures are increasingly relying upon accelerators in order to optimize the placement of specific computational workloads. In addition, large-scale computing infrastructures utilized in HPC, data intensive computing, and cloud computing must rely almost exclusively upon commodity device architectures provided by third-party manufacturers. The end result being a final system architecture that lacks specificity for the target software workload. At the same time, there is a trend in the FPGA space of much larger FPGAs with a lot more resources and hardened IP blocks, making this type of architecture design space exploration much easier. The OpenSoC System Architect infrastructure combines several open source design tools and methodologies into a central infrastructure for designing, developing, and verifying the necessary hardware and software modules required to implement application-specific processors for use in FPGAs. The end result is an infrastructure that permits rapid development and deployment of application-specific accelerators and softcores, including a fully functional software development tool chain.