A Unified Approach for Managing Heterogeneous Processing Elements on FPGAs

FPGA designs do not typically include all available processing elements, e.g., LUTs, DSPs and embedded cores. Additional work is required to manage their different implementations and behaviour, which can unbalance parallel pipelines and complicate development. In this paper we introduce a novel management architecture to unify heterogeneous processing elements into compute pools. A pool formed of E processing elements, each implementing the same function, serves D parallel function calls. A call-and-response approach to computation allows for different processing element implementations, connections, latencies and non-deterministic behaviour. Our rotating scheduler automatically arbitrates access to processing elements, uses greatly simplified routing, and scales linearly with D parallel accesses to the compute pool. Processing elements can easily be added to improve performance, or removed to reduce resource use and routing, facilitating higher operating frequencies. Migrating to larger or smaller FPGAs thus comes at a known performance cost. We assess our framework with a range of neural network activation functions (ReLU, LReLU, ELU, GELU, sigmoid, swish, softplus and tanh) on the Xilinx Alveo U280.