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In multi-FPGA prototyping systems for circuit verification, serialized time-multiplexed I/O technique is used because of the limited number of I/O pins of an FPGA. The verification time depends on a selection of inter-FPGA signals to be time-multiplexed. In this paper, we propose a method that minimizes the verification time of multi-FPGA systems by finding an optimal selection of inter-FPGA signals to be timemultiplexed. In the experiments, it is shown that the estimated verification time is improved 38.2% on average compared with conventional methods.

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Multi-FPGA prototyping systems are widely used to verify logic circuit designs. To implement a large circuit using such a system, the circuit is partitioned into multiple FPGAs. Subsequently, sub-circuits assigned to FPGAs are connected using interconnection resources among the FPGAs. Because of limited resources, time-multiplexed I/Os are used to accommodate all signals in exchange for system speed. In this study, we propose an optimization method of inter-FPGA connections for multi-FPGA systems with time-multiplexed I/Os to shorten the verification time by accelerating the systems. Our method decides whether each inter-FPGA signal is transferred by a normal I/O or a time-multiplexed I/O, which is slower than a normal I/O but can transfer multiple signals. Our method optimizes inter-FPGA connections not only between a single FPGA pair, but among all the FPGAs. Experiments showed that for four-way partitioned circuits, our method obtains an average system clock period 16.0% shorter than that of a conventional method.