I/O and Performance Tradeoffs with the FunctionBus during Multi-FPGA Partitioning

We improve upon a new approach for automatically partitioning a system among several FPGA's. The new approach partitions a system's functional specification, now commonly available, rather than its structural implementation. The improvement uses a bus, the FunctionBus, for implementing function calls among FPGA's. The bus can be used with any number of FPGA's, and its protocol uses only a small amount of existing FPGA hardware, requiring no special hardware. While functional rather than structural partitioning can substantially reduce the number of input/output pins (I/O), using the FunctionBus takes such reduction even further. In particular, performance and I/O can be traded-off by varying the bus size, as demonstrated using several examples. 1 Introduction Partitioning a system among multiple FPGA's has attracted extensive investigation [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11]. These approaches share one common feature: they each partition a system's structural implementation (i.e., ..

I/O and Performance Tradeoffs with the FunctionBus during Multi-FPGA Partitioning

We improve upon a new approach for automatically partitioning a system among several FPGA's. The new approach partitions a system's functional specification, now commonly available, rather than its structural implementation. The improvement uses a bus, the FunctionBus, for implementing function calls among FPGA's. The bus can be used with any number of FPGA's, and its protocol uses only a small amount of existing FPGA hardware, requiring no special hardware. While functional rather than structural partitioning can substantially reduce the number of input/output pins (I/O), using the FunctionBus takes such reduction even further. In particular, performance and I/O can be traded-off by varying the bus size, as demonstrated using several examples