LEAP: A Deep Learning based Aging-Aware Architecture Exploration Framework for FPGAs

Transistor aging raises a vital lifetime reliability challenge for FPGA devices in advanced technology nodes. In this paper, we design a tool called LEAP to enable the aging-aware FPGA architecture exploration. The core idea of LEAP is to efficiently model the aging-induced delay degradation at the coarse-grained FPGA basic block level using deep neural networks (DNNs), while achieving almost the same accuracy as the transistor-level simulation. For each type of the FPGA basic block such as LUT and DSP, we first characterize its accurate delay degradation via transistor-level SPICE simulation under a versatile set of aging factors from the FPGA fabric and in-field operation. Then we train one DNN model for each block type to learn the relation between its delay degradation and aging factors. Moreover, we integrate our DNN models into the widely used Verilog-to-Routing (VTR 8) toolflow and generate the aging-aware FPGA architecture file. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed flow can predict the delay degradation of FPGA blocks more than 10⁴x to 10⁷x faster than transistor-level SPICE simulation, with the maximum prediction error of less than 0.7%. Therefore, FPGA architects can leverage LEAP to explore better aging-aware FPGA architectures.