A design workflow for dynamically reconfigurable multi-FPGA systems

Multi-FPGA systems (MFS's) represent a promising technology for various applications, such as the implementation of supercomputers and parallel and computational intensive emulation systems. On the other hand, dynamic reconfigurability expands the possibilities of traditional FPGAs by providing them the capability of adapting their functionality while still running to cope with runtime environment changes. These two research directions are merged together in this work, that describes a methodology for designing dynamic reconfigurable MFS's. In this paper a novel MFS design flow has been described, which makes use of blocks reuse through dynamic reconfigurability to make the implementation of large systems feasible even on multi-FPGA architectures with strict physical constraints. Functional to this goal is the development of an algorithm for the extraction of the isomorphic structures of a circuit that extensively exploits the hierarchy of the design.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: VLSI
• Authors: Alessandro Panella, Marco D. Santambrogio, Francesco Redaelli, Fabio Cancare, Donatella Sciuto
• Keywords: Computational Intensive Emulation, Dynamic Reconfigurability, Dynamic Reconfigurable Mfs, Software Engineering, VLSI 2010