Automata-to-Routing: An Open-Source Toolchain for Design-Space Exploration of Spatial Automata Processing Architectures

Newly-available spatial architectures to accelerate finite-automata processing have spurred research and development on novel automata-based applications. However, spatial automata processing architecture research is lacking, because of a lack of automata optimization and place-and-route tools. To solve this issue, we propose a new, open-source toolchain–Automata-to-Routing (ATR)–that enables design-space exploration of spatial automata architectures. ATR leverages existing open-source tools for both automata processing and FPGA architecture research. To demonstrate the usefulness of this new toolchain, we use it to analyze design choices of spatial automata processing architectures. We first show that ATR is capable of modeling the logic tiles of a commercially-available spatial automata processing architecture. We then use ATR to compare and contrast two different routing architecture methodologies–hierarchical and 2D-mesh–over a set of diverse automata benchmarks. We show that shallower 2D-mesh-style routing fabrics can route complex automata with equal channel width, while using up to 4.2x fewer logic tile resources.