Mission control: A performance metric and analysis of control logic for pipelined architectures on FPGAs

Abstract

The performance of a pipelined architecture is often limited by incorrectly designed or poorly implemented control logic. Once a design is implemented and meets timing constraints, the mission is to evaluate if it is achieving optimum performance. At this stage, the number of pipelines and functional units are fixed and the amount of resources and memory bandwidth are finalized. If a design is performing suboptimally the only recourse is to improve the control logic. In this paper we present a metric to quantify the achievable performance of a design and use it to analyze performance degradation due to control logic. We analyze the control logic of existing architectures and present improvements that achieve speedups of up to 10.7×.