In this paper, we present AutoRARE, a Java-based automated design tool for generating Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based hardware accelerators. AutoRARE automatically generates all VHDL models needed to build/synthesize a processor specifically tailored for each application. The user needs only provide the VHDL description of a special-purpose floating point Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) or function core. The tool generates the VHDL description for the memory interface, memory controller, host processor interface, and the application specific processor. We also present details of the FPGA-based multi-memory hardware accelerator for accelerating computationally intensive applications, generated using AutoRARE. The multi-memory hardware accelerator is highly pipelined and able to simultaneously read and write multiple floating point values from multiple memories. The multi-memory architecture is the key to providing hardware accelerators that execute 10X-100X faster than typical multi-core processors. The Taylor Series expansion of the sine/cosine function is used as an application to demonstrate the merits of the multi-memory hardware accelerator. In our experiments, we executed the Taylor Series in software and compared execution times with an FPGA-based hardware implementation. Our experiments show that the FPGA-based multi-memory Taylor Series hardware accelerator is 481X faster than software executing the Taylor Series on a typical server.

Significant barriers to real time face detection have been the complexity of computation kernels, minimal cost and superior accuracy requirements for both software and hardware implementation based on traditional high performance computing. It is desirable to develop variable precision face detection block for high dynamic range applications including night vision and infrared face detection applications. This paper developed an Arctan function for face detection which supports input ranges upto 360 degrees for Histogram of Oriented Graph. Our implementation takes advantage of mathematical identities for the pedestrian HOG computation. We compare our HOG block design to fixed point implementations and found that using floating point HOG is not be computationally expensive and can accelerate face detection process.

This paper presents a reconfigurable computing environment while addressing the problem of porting High Performance Computing (HPC) applications directly to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)-based architectures. The objectives of this research are developing a comprehensive floating point library of essential functions for scientific applications; demonstrate order of magnitude speedup of reconfigurable computing applications, demonstrating the effectiveness of automated design framework for both development and test of scientific algorithms. The developed framework can be reused in various scientific applications which shares kernel functions. The study of this research has identified an exponential function as a kernel for cellular ophthalmoscopy camera processing, traffic monitoring and light wave simulation. The paper demonstrates 30x speedup of these kernels in three algorithms using its novel architecture and its automated toolset. Exponential kernel generation case study and its flexible hardware implementation on an FPGA has been validated onto a Xilinx LX-100 device and the Nallatech H101-PCIXM FPGA board.

Algorithms for radar signal processing, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are computationally intensive and require considerable execution time on a general purpose processor. Reconfigurable logic can be used to off-load the primary computational kernel onto a custom computing machine in order to reduce execution time by an order of magnitude as compared to kernel execution on a general purpose processor. Specifically, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can be used to house hardware-based custom implementations of these kernels to speed up these applications. In this paper, we demonstrate a methodology for algorithm acceleration. We used SAR as a case study to illustrate the tremendous potential for algorithm acceleration offered by FPGAs. Initially, we profiled the SAR algorithm and implemented a homomorphic filter using a hardware implementation of the natural logarithm. Experimental results show an average speed-up of 188 when using the FPGA-based hardware accelerator as opposed to using a software implementation running on a typical general purpose processor.