The paper “OpenFPGA: Towards Automated Prototyping for Versatile FPGAs,” was awarded Best Contribution from among 25 papers accepted to the Workshop on Open-Source EDA Technology (WOSET), which is part of the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) 2020.
Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, who is also associate chair of Academics and Strategic Initiatives for the department, leads the development of OpenFPGA project, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
FPGAs have become an essential component in modern computing systems, empowering data centers, communication systems, and defense applications. However, FPGA is notoriously hard to produce and requires significant engineering efforts even for world-leading vendors. OpenFPGA is the first open-source EDA framework that significantly accelerates the development cycles – down to 24-hours for customizable FPGA architectures – and reduces engineering efforts from a group to only a few experienced engineers. And because it is open-source to the public, any research group or small-size company can use OpenFPGA to produce custom and modern FPGAs.