Army Educational Outreach Program High School Apprenticeship Report: Review of Commercial FPGAs and Benchmarking Using Open FPGA

This summers Army Educational Outreach Program apprenticeship consisted of two main focuses. The first was field programmable gate array (FPGA) research. We have examined a multitude of private companies that are developing their own FPGAs to be sold publicly. We collected data and statistics on some of the companies most powerful devices and placed them in a spreadsheet for comparison. We have also taken a look at lots of research conducted on FPGAs using ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore to access conferences and articles. We spent a considerable amount of time scouring through articles gathering information on FPGAs to get a better sense of the current state of FPGAs. The second half of the summer focused on working in OpenFPGA. OpenFPGA is a Linux-based tool that is useful for mapping circuits to FPGAs and generating custom FPGA chips. We worked with the OpenFPGA developers to improve their documentation and experimented in OpenFPGA to see the effects of different design choices. We installed OpenFPGA on a virtual Linux machine, and ran multiple OpenFPGA tasks and got area estimates of FPGAs mapped with different circuits. We also developed a methodology for synthesizing unmapped circuits using Yosys.