Research Interests of Jonathan Rose


My research is concerned with all aspects of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). My principal goal is to increase significantly the capabilities of FPGAs to the point where they are the obvious choice over full-fabrication Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). My primary focus is FPGA architecture and CAD - understanding the science of FPGA architecture by exploring new ideas in architecture that may lead to significant advances in their capability. This is inextricably linked with new CAD algorithms and software that can successfully exploit new architectures.

I am also interested in automating the creation of FPGAs themselves, by developing tools that can automate the both the electrical and physical design of an FPGA from a relatively simple, textual description of an FPGA architecture. I believe this will work will give us insight into FPGA architectures.

A third area of interest is to build flexible hardware systems, and then use them for novel applications that can benefiti significantly from that flexibility, in areas such as computer vision, graphics and bioinformatics and biological simulation.

Another way to improve FPGAs is to build software specific to application areas (such as Processors, for example) that constructs the "perfect" hardware for a given application, a key capability of FPGAs.

Below is a listing of the various sub-disciplines of my research on FPGAs, and links to other pages describing these topics further.


FPGA Architecture
CAD for FPGAs
Field-Programmable Systems (Including The Transmogrifier-4)
Soft Processor Architecture
Automated FPGA Creation (Electrical Design and Layout) from an Architectural Specification
Synthetic Benchmark Generation and Circuit Characterization

Research on FPGAs at the University of Toronto.


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