Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
8 years agoArria 10 multiplier speed
I'm rather new to practical FPGA design though I have a lot of theoretical background.
I'm working with (starting/trying to would be more accurate) the Arria 10 development kit which has Arria 10 10AS066N3F40E2SG in case it matters but this is a more general question. I've been up and down the information highway and forums and documentation for half a day but I can't find the answer. How do I determine what kind of speeds this chip is capable? I realise that the actual design will affect what can be achieved but the design will be influenced by speeds that can be achieved, kind of chicken and egg eh? Here is my current problem. I need to perform 10 bit x10 bit => 20 bit (signed) multiplication and accumulate the result at 730 MHz. How can I find out if this is at all realisable? If not I need divide the data stream to two or more parallel processing paths. I'm looking for concrete and practical guidance. I expect I will need to write some synthesisable Verilog and time that on the simulator right? From here: https://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece5760/de1_soc/hdl_style_qts_qii51007.pdf I found (just an example): module signed_mult (out, clk, a, b); output [15:0] out; input clk; input signed [7:0] a; input signed [7:0] b; reg signed [7:0] a_reg; reg signed [7:0] b_reg; reg signed [15:0] out; wire signed [15:0] mult_out; assign mult_out = a_reg * b_reg; always @ (posedge clk) begin a_reg <= a; b_reg <= b; out <= mult_out; end endmodule This is 1 stage pipe line I think, but how could this be further pipelined? AFAIU it can't -- hopefully it will be realised with a hardware multiplier block in Arria 10 and that set the ultimate limit (routing delays etc not withstanding), right? But what is this limit, it must be documented somewhere? Is there a ready to compile synthesisable Verilog example somewhere which I could start to play with ? Or something that would be a good starting point, surely I'm not the first person to need something like that... I'm so out of my depth atm here.... Help would be greatly appreciated. wbr Kusti