An FPGA-based Othello endgame solver

A single chip FPGA-based Othello endgame solver is presented in This work. The solver includes all the hardware for move checking, disc flipping, move selection, board evaluation and alpha-beta pruning. On a Xilinx Virtex XCVW00E-6 device operating at 50 MHz, the chip can search 3.14 million Othello positions per second. The endgame chip achieves a speedup of 3.5 over an 800 MHz Pentium III machine, showing that performance similar to that of a high end microprocessor can be achieved using modest FPGA resources. By using a larger FPGA, a more sophisticated search algorithm and an improved datapath, we believe that a single FPGA based endgame solver with at least two orders of magnitude better performance can be developed.