FPGA based prototyping for verification and evaluation in hardware-software cosynthesis

The roles of FPGAs in reprogrammable systems

“…In this way the system can still efficiently handle the systolic circuits that Splash was built to support, since it retains the nearest-neighbor interconnect, but the crossbar supports more general communication patterns, either in support of or as replacement to the direct interconnections. There are several other augmented linear arrays [Benner94,Box94,Darnauer94,Carrera95]. One example is the Anyboard [Thomae91, Van den Bout92], which has a linear array of FPGAs augmented by global buses (Figure 16).…”

“…These chips are usually connected to the FPGAs, and are used as temporary storage for results, as well as general-purpose memories for circuit emulation. Other systems have included integer and/or floating point ALUs [Wolfe88,Williams91,Lewis93,Benner94,Bakkes96,Knittel96], DSPs [Engels91,Bergmann94,vom Bögel94,Zycad94,Pottinger95], and general-purpose processors [Filloque93,Shaw93,Raimbault93,Benner94,Koch94b,vom Bögel94,Zycad94] to handle portions of computations where dedicated chips perform better than FPGA solutions. Another common inclusion into a multi-FPGA system is crossbars or FPICs.…”

Fast prototyping: a case study the JPEG compression algorithm

“…As in the context of designing digital circuits, models and simulation tools can be used. In codesign, people use co-simulation tools [1,2,3]. Simulating all configurations of complex circuits will take an exponential amount of time (in generally, digital simulators are assumed to be able to simulate one event per second for complex circuits).…”