4 ms·

>I want to pave the way for FPGAs to be usable in everything from laptop/desktop computers to phones (if the static power consumption gets better). I have some

by catern 12y ago

>I want to pave the way for FPGAs to be usable in everything from laptop/desktop computers to phones (if the static power consumption gets better). I have some very interesting ideas of what an average user could do with in system FPGAs that can be reconfigured at runtime. What are these ideas?

dominicgs 12y ago
I can't speak for OP, but my interest is in signal processing. DSP and FPGAs are a great match and with the boom in software defined radio, having reconfigurable DSP capabilities is extremely useful. For example, if 802.11b devices had been built using FPGAs, an upgrade to 802.11g could have been an OTA update. Or a new Bluetooth variant emerges (e.g. BLE) and support could be added to computers and phones overnight. For these applications it's useful to think of an FPGA as a chip that you can patch, upgrade or reconfigure for new applications. However, looking at it from another angle, we can think of it as software that isn't limited by the CPU architecture. This second category opens up the possibility of crypto algorithms that don't suffer from the timing attacks that they do on the CPU. Or a video codec that can be designed without having to worry about which extensions the CPU supports. I'm sure there are much better examples and some of these are bad ideas that would work better on a CPU, but hopefully that gives you some ideas.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Of course on the other hand FPGAs are not a great fit for mobile devices, which are one of the main consumers of wireless communication (radio) technology.
- bravo22 12y ago
  SDR uses orders of magnitude more power than an ASIC implementation which is why no one uses them except for base stations -- such as cell towers. FPGA based design for crypto would have the same timing attack as CPU. It can be worked around the same way it would for a CPU.
  - dominicgs 12y ago
    Sure, ASICs are always going to beat FPGAs and CPUs in power consumption for the same task, but there are also applications where the ability to update the system far outweigh the power requirements. Interestingly, SDR is being used for the UK's small scale digital radio station trials this year. Off the shelf SDR hardware appears to be performing well enough at a lower cost than bespoke DAB hardware. Again, this fits in with your base station category. You're right about timing attacks, I have no idea what I was thinking there. Would they be better for power analysis attacks? I guess if we're concerned about that then we'll end up back at ASICs again.
    - bravo22 12y ago
      FPGAs ARE ASICs :) Just a special case of ASICs. The fabrication and processes are the same. There is no advantage of one over the other. FPGAs are more vulnerable in some ways than ASICs because someone could steal your design and duplicate it much much more easily than an ASIC. A lot of crypto chips have built in protection against many side-channel attacks.
- diamondman 12y ago
  I am replying to this comment instead of the multiple people under it. You guys are right that FPGAs are not quite ready, or maybe will never be ready to be the primary radio for a phone because of the static power consumption. You could still have one available for certain burst operations that need to be highly accelerated. Good point about the timing attacks on crypto, but hardware crypto can be updated within an FPGA. This can be seen as a pro and a con to security.
diamondman 12y ago
OP here dominicgs had some good ideas since software defined radio is very powerful. One extreme example of something you could do with a reconfigurable radio signal processor in your machine is install things that the FCC would not let be produced and sold. For example if someone reversed the military high accuracy GPS stuff, and produced a verilog spec anonymously so he was not sent to prison forever, no one would be able to use that to produce chips in consumer devices. But if we found verilog and wanted military GPS on our phones, all we do is install software. Another example some friends have been excited about is emulation of older hardware, including video games, but much more. I will describe old games since they are closer to people's hearts. All the old cartridge based games had the actual cartridge contain half of the hardware needed to make a full computer. This immediately complicated emulation. But the real issue comes from quirks in the actual hardware. This is an issue because developers had no API except the exact hardware specifications that every console had. No one worried about checking their clock frequency was correct and dividing it to the right point so they got a certain framerate... everything was constant. Developers would find and exploit undocumented glitches in the hardware to make things faster, or sometimes to make them run at all. Hell, some games used the difference in clock frequency between two internal chips as a source for PCM sound to make little bleeps so they could save code. For this last example this means that unless you are emulating to the clock cycle each of these chips and sometimes their exact internal structures, some game will not work or crash randomly. The CPU power to do this is insane: a 3GHz core was the minimum suggested processor for running a highly accurate NES emulator in real time. FPGAs let us implement the actual system, bugs and all, in hardware and not worry about CPU usage. Give the fpga a blob of shared memory for writing video and PCM data to and the CPU just passes blobs of memory between devices. Programs like Postgres could implement highly optimized methods of certain algorithms like hashing for looking up in an index. The kernel could detect it has FPGA space and offload some of its work to the chip. I hope these have sounded interesting.
- sixdimensional 12y ago
  I'm personally interested in your comment about Postgres, I have been thinking about implementing digital circuit versions of certain database operators to see if FPGAs can be used for distributed, parallel processing of data streams. I think there is a fit for digital versions of analog circuits to substitute for software operators (if that makes any sense - this is pushing my knowledge level to the limit). I've seen some amazing related work at MIT here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/fpga2014-wjun.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/fpga2014-wjun.pdf

by catern 12y ago

dominicgs 12y ago

I can't speak for OP, but my interest is in signal processing. DSP and FPGAs are a great match and with the boom in software defined radio, having reconfigurable DSP capabilities is extremely useful. For example, if 802.11b devices had been built using FPGAs, an upgrade to 802.11g could have been an OTA update. Or a new Bluetooth variant emerges (e.g. BLE) and support could be added to computers and phones overnight. For these applications it's useful to think of an FPGA as a chip that you can patch, upgrade or reconfigure for new applications. However, looking at it from another angle, we can think of it as software that isn't limited by the CPU architecture. This second category opens up the possibility of crypto algorithms that don't suffer from the timing attacks that they do on the CPU. Or a video codec that can be designed without having to worry about which extensions the CPU supports. I'm sure there are much better examples and some of these are bad ideas that would work better on a CPU, but hopefully that gives you some ideas.

sliverstorm 12y ago
Of course on the other hand FPGAs are not a great fit for mobile devices, which are one of the main consumers of wireless communication (radio) technology.
bravo22 12y ago
SDR uses orders of magnitude more power than an ASIC implementation which is why no one uses them except for base stations -- such as cell towers. FPGA based design for crypto would have the same timing attack as CPU. It can be worked around the same way it would for a CPU.
- dominicgs 12y ago
  Sure, ASICs are always going to beat FPGAs and CPUs in power consumption for the same task, but there are also applications where the ability to update the system far outweigh the power requirements. Interestingly, SDR is being used for the UK's small scale digital radio station trials this year. Off the shelf SDR hardware appears to be performing well enough at a lower cost than bespoke DAB hardware. Again, this fits in with your base station category. You're right about timing attacks, I have no idea what I was thinking there. Would they be better for power analysis attacks? I guess if we're concerned about that then we'll end up back at ASICs again.
  - bravo22 12y ago
    FPGAs ARE ASICs :) Just a special case of ASICs. The fabrication and processes are the same. There is no advantage of one over the other. FPGAs are more vulnerable in some ways than ASICs because someone could steal your design and duplicate it much much more easily than an ASIC. A lot of crypto chips have built in protection against many side-channel attacks.
diamondman 12y ago
I am replying to this comment instead of the multiple people under it. You guys are right that FPGAs are not quite ready, or maybe will never be ready to be the primary radio for a phone because of the static power consumption. You could still have one available for certain burst operations that need to be highly accelerated. Good point about the timing attacks on crypto, but hardware crypto can be updated within an FPGA. This can be seen as a pro and a con to security.

diamondman 12y ago

OP here dominicgs had some good ideas since software defined radio is very powerful. One extreme example of something you could do with a reconfigurable radio signal processor in your machine is install things that the FCC would not let be produced and sold. For example if someone reversed the military high accuracy GPS stuff, and produced a verilog spec anonymously so he was not sent to prison forever, no one would be able to use that to produce chips in consumer devices. But if we found verilog and wanted military GPS on our phones, all we do is install software. Another example some friends have been excited about is emulation of older hardware, including video games, but much more. I will describe old games since they are closer to people's hearts. All the old cartridge based games had the actual cartridge contain half of the hardware needed to make a full computer. This immediately complicated emulation. But the real issue comes from quirks in the actual hardware. This is an issue because developers had no API except the exact hardware specifications that every console had. No one worried about checking their clock frequency was correct and dividing it to the right point so they got a certain framerate... everything was constant. Developers would find and exploit undocumented glitches in the hardware to make things faster, or sometimes to make them run at all. Hell, some games used the difference in clock frequency between two internal chips as a source for PCM sound to make little bleeps so they could save code. For this last example this means that unless you are emulating to the clock cycle each of these chips and sometimes their exact internal structures, some game will not work or crash randomly. The CPU power to do this is insane: a 3GHz core was the minimum suggested processor for running a highly accurate NES emulator in real time. FPGAs let us implement the actual system, bugs and all, in hardware and not worry about CPU usage. Give the fpga a blob of shared memory for writing video and PCM data to and the CPU just passes blobs of memory between devices. Programs like Postgres could implement highly optimized methods of certain algorithms like hashing for looking up in an index. The kernel could detect it has FPGA space and offload some of its work to the chip. I hope these have sounded interesting.

sixdimensional 12y ago
I'm personally interested in your comment about Postgres, I have been thinking about implementing digital circuit versions of certain database operators to see if FPGAs can be used for distributed, parallel processing of data streams. I think there is a fit for digital versions of analog circuits to substitute for software operators (if that makes any sense - this is pushing my knowledge level to the limit). I've seen some amazing related work at MIT here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/fpga2014-wjun.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/wjun/papers/fpga2014-wjun.pdf