Communications Infrastructure Generation for Modular FPGA Reconfiguration

Abstract

Modules that are swapped dynamically at run-time on an FPGA have varying communication needs over time. In order to support this, we aim to generate a wiring infrastructure that caters for the dynamically-changing module interfaces. This, however, imposes a regular structure for laying out modules on a device, which may result in longer inter-module wiring paths as compared to traditional methods where the netlists are flattened. This paper studies placing modules within a structured layout to compare resulting circuit speeds with those obtained by traditional methods. Our results indicate that the difference in critical path delay is high at very low utilisation, but that the overhead is absorbed as the number of modules and interconnection density increases to realistic levels. The authors conclude that implementing such a wiring infrastructure has manageable overheads while having the added advantage of being amenable to dynamic reconfiguration.