Hydrate: Hybrid reconfigurable architecture expressions

This paper presents Hydrate (HYbriD Reconfigurable ArchiTecture Expressions), a generic architecture description language for exploring hybrid FPGA designs. Hydrate is based on the XML architecture description for the VPR tool. These expressions consist of variable, repeat and conditional statements to allow flexible, reusable and readable description for FPGA architectures, without modifying the VPR core. Two case studies, involving modern FPGA and floating-point applications, are used to illustrate our approach. Compared with VPR5.0 and VPR6.0, the architecture file format adopted by Hydrate is often much smaller and easier to understand, and over 90% of file size reduction for complex FPGAs can be achieved. Moreover, Hydrate is compatible with different versions of VPR, so that the powerful VPR tool flow can be used to explore future architectures. © 2011 IEEE.