Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

As portable electronics constantly find their way into the hands of eager consumers, the demands placed on these products and their circuits are ever increasing. More features and more performance are continuously demanded by consumers. This feature-driven market has brought with it several constraints on the type of circuits utilized in developing these portable devices. Cell-Phones, PDA's, MP3 players and various other portable electronics require different voltage levels to power different architectures that realize the many features within the device. This work demonstrates a technique to design Programmable Low Power Low Dropout Voltage Regulators (LDO). The LDO proposed in this research utilizes a fast-transient feedback loop in order to improve transient response and guarantee stability in all the programmable output levels. Specifically, the main parameters to be improved are stability over the entire load current range, reduced overshoot and undershoot variations in transient response, reduction of LDO deflection voltage, minimization of standby current and low voltage (Vin = 1.2V) operation.

This thesis examines the problem of reducing reconfiguration time of an island-style FPGA at its configuration memory level. The approach followed is to examine configuration encoding techniques in order to reduce the size of the bitstream that must be loaded onto the device to perform a reconfiguration. A detailed analysis of a set of benchmark circuits on various island-style FPGAs shows that a typical circuit randomly changes a small number of bits in the {\it null} or default configuration state of the device. This feature is exploited by developing efficient encoding schemes for configuration data. For a wide set of benchmark circuits on various FPGAs, it is shown that the proposed methods outperform all previous configuration compression methods and, depending upon the relative size of the circuit to the device, compress within 5\% of the fundamental information theoretic limit. Moreover, it is shown that the corresponding decoders are simple to implement in hardware and scale well with device size and available configuration bandwidth. It is not unreasonable to expect that with little modification to existing FPGA configuration memory systems and acceptable increase in configuration power a 10-fold improvement in configuration delay could be achieved. The main contribution of this thesis is that it defines the limit of configuration compression for the FPGAs under consideration and develops practical methods of overcoming this reconfiguration bottleneck. The functional density of reconfigurable devices could thereby be enhanced and the range of potential applications reasonably expanded.

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2009. / Vita. The entire thesis text is included in file. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed November 17, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 53).

Thesis (M. Eng. Sc.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Current approaches to supporting module-based FPGA reconfiguration focus on various aspects and sub-problems in the area but do not combine to form a coherent, top-down methodology that factors low-level device parameters into every step of the design flow. This thesis proposes such a top-down methodology from application specification to low-level implementation, centered around examining the problem of generating a point-to-point communications infrastructure to support the changing interfaces of dynamically placed modules. Low-level implementation parameters are considered at every stage to ensure that area, timing and budget constraints of the application are met. The approach advocates the regular layout of modules surrounded by a wiring harness supporting the communications for those modules, and thus provides an advanced understanding of how to implement the "fixed wiring harness" model of reconfigurable computing proposed by Brebner. Results have shown that compared to flattened net lists the regularity of the layout does not impose significant overheads on critical path delays. At high communication densities it can even result in lower delays. The core of the methodology is an infrastructure generation process that allocates modules to slots and merges configuration graphs to form wiring harnesses that support the communications for these merged configurations. This thesis suggests methods and evaluates algorithms for configuration graph merging so as to reduce run-time reconfiguration overheads. Initial experiments with a greedy merging algorithm performed on an optical flow application resulted in a substantial reduction of 64% in reconfiguration time. The effects of graph merging with the initial greedy algorithm and an improved dynamic programming algorithm were explored for a range of device sizes and architectural parameters. Results show that configuration merging using the greedy method results in significant reductions to the reconfiguration delay. The dynamic programming algorithm provides consistent improvements above and beyond the savings provided by the greedy method. In addition, a strong correlation was identified between the quality of front-end design activities such as partitioning and the effectiveness of back-end implementations. The methodology is integrated into the Xilinx commercial tool flow for partial reconfiguration, and is effective for implementing applications for module-based FPGA reconfiguration where the modules and their communications requirements are known at design time. It also allows a system designer to consider alternate device sizes and parameters until a set is found that satisfies the application constraints.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 54). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-112). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 37-40).