Comparison of FPGA and ASIC Implementation of a Linear Congruence Solver

Residual processor (RP) is a dedicated hardware for solution of sets of linear congruences. RPs are parts of a larger modular system for error-free solution of linear equations in residue arithmetic. We present new FPGA and ASIC RP implementations, focusing mainly on their memory units being a bottleneck of the calculation and therefore determining the efficiency of the system. First, we choose an FPGA to easily test the functionality of our implementation, then we do the same in ASIC, and finally we compare both implementations together. The experimental FPGA results are obtained for Xilinx Virtex 6, while the ASIC results are obtained from Synopsys tools with a 130 nm standard cell library. Results also present a maximum matrix dimension fitting directly into the FPGA and achieved speed as a function of the dimension.