FPGA Design

Every digital ASIC flow needs comprehensive FPGA emulation due to the high cost impact factor of the manufacturing and extended delivery time. In other side, FPGA could be seen as standalone product without ASIC target in mind, yet the ASIC path is still open by converting FPGA design to ASIC flow. We had FPGA’s implemented nearly in all designs to reduce time to market and on the target of first working silicon. 

Accumulated our FPGA experiences could be seen in the following topics

  • Feasibility studies
  • Architecture development
  • HDL implementation considering available FPGA’s resources and limitation
  • System integration
  • Design optimization
  • Embedded software development for SoCs with soft and hard processor cores
  • Specialized in Xilinx Zynq platform both Linux based and bare metal
  • Tailoring HDL components accessible through AXI bus from ARM processor inside Zynq platforms
  • High-level synthesis for fast implementation of C based algorithms
  • System testing and verification, including test bench development, RTL verification and post-synthesis simulation.

Custom FPGA Board

Sometimes you cannot find exact FPGA development platform for your design or due to the cost factor some parts need to be removed/added. High pinout count of the existing FPGA needs multi-layer high-speed PCB design. We have already gone through this path which helps you to reduce time to market of your FPGA design. The specification of the Integro Development Platform built around Xilinx FPGA comes next.

    • Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP20/30/40/50-FF1152
    • High-speed Serial Communication, with two Rocket I/O connectors, one SATA host interface and two SMA high-speed connectors
    • Up to 256MB DDR SDRAM
    • 2MB 32-bit 167MHz Synchronous SRAM
    • Up to 32MB Flash Memory
    • Four Fast Ethernet port and One Gigabit Ethernet Port
    • RS-232 serial port
    • Smart Card Receptacle
    • PCMCIA PC-Card reader
    • One Channel of E1 Line Interface
    • Two High-speed USB Host controller and one High-speed OTG (Dual-Role) Controller
    • 8/16-bit HPI/SPI DSP Interface
    • Two 120-pin general purpose I/O expansion connectors
    • DIP switches, test LEDs, text LCD Interface and test Points as debugging Facilities

FPGA Crypto Miner

Implementing block-chain based hash algorithm inside FPGA provides an alternative way to conventional CPU/GPU/ASIC mining platforms with considerably less power consumption. The power consumption nowadays is a game changer in crypto mining process. One single FPGA board consumes less than 100W, small enough to be feed from solar cells and yet powerful enough to be compared with GPU. This superior power advantage reduces the cooling fan requirement when compared to noisy ASIC miners.

FPGA mining has considerable power advantage against CPU/GPU. In addition, it is also comparable to ASIC miners in term of ROI and maximum profit.

Current trend to high-level synthesis of C-implemented hash algorithms greatly reduces implementation time while still there is room for custom RTL implementation with superior performance.

In summary FPGA’s advantage as a crypto-currency mining platform are listed below

  • CPU is not fast enough anymore
  • GPU is less profitable
  • ASIC mining comes at high price and high power consumption
  • FPGA well suites in ASIC-resistance coins
  • FPGA can withstand hard-fork
  • FPGA has long life time.
  • FPGA Can be used in other applications such as artificial intelligence and data-centers

Case study

Denarious Coin Mining on FPGA

Denarious is based on Tribus

The FPGA mining platform composed of one host board for pool communication and another FPGA board for implementing hash functions in configurable hardware.

Host board could be any low-cost platform such as Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Xilinx Zynq equipped with Linux OS. The FPGA board required to have big LUT resources with limited peripherals such as Xilinx Kintex FPGA series. Low bit-rate serial link connects these two boards for exchanging data.

Pool Comm

Low-cost Linux

UART

FPGA