Dissertation Talk: BFG, a Silicon Compiler for High-Performance Reconfigurable Fabrics

Event details Date: Thursday, July 9, 2026 Time: 11:00 AM to 11:00 AM Location: Wozniak Lounge, 430-438 Soda Hall Type: Performing Arts Audience: Faculty,Students About this event Innovation around Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) remains hamstrung by a lack of access to production architectures. Commercial architectures are secret and research architectures are considered out of date. Others have tried to solve this by writing synthesizable top-down FPGA generators, which generate RTL descriptions of the fabric that must be implemented with standard cells. Though a boon for access and architectural exploration, these tools sacrifice considerable physical performance across power, delay and area. This talk presents BFG, an alternative approach to FPGA generation that programmatically generates all circuits together with custom layout. In Skywater 130nm, BFG’s cells achieve up to 59% lower power-delay-area product than equivalent logic synthesized with standard cells. Each of BFG’s three contributions will be discussed: an unencumbered open-source C++ AMS design framework; a collection of parametric IP generators for FPGA components; and a study reverse-engineering a modern commercial architecture with an example of how BFG might be used to build it. Official event details: https://events.berkeley.edu/eecs/event/323938-dissertation-talk-bfg-a-silicon-compiler-for