Efficient Pathfinding Co-Processors for FPGAs

Pathfinding algorithms are at the heart of several classes of applications, such as network appliances (routing), GPS navigation and autonomous cars, which are related to recent trends in Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT). Moreover, advances in semiconductor miniaturization technologies have enabled the design of efficient Systems-on-Chip (SoC) devices, with demanding performance requirements and energy consumption constraints. Such systems might include Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to allow the design of customized co-processors that yield lower power consumption and higher performance. Therefore, this work aims at designing and evaluating four efficient pathfinding co-processors, each one implementing a different well-known pathfinding algorithm: breadth-first, dijkstra, greedy and a-star. Each co-processor is designed using Xilinx High-Level Synthesis (HLS) compiler and is implemented in the programming logic of a Xilinx FPGA embedded with an ARM microprocessor, which is in charge of controlling the set of co-processors. Extensive performance, circuit-area and energy consumption results shows that each co-processor can efficiently execute a pathfinding algorithm, paving the way for novel dedicated accelerators.