Achieving High-Latency, Low-Bandwidth Communication: Logic Emulation Interfaces
Scott Hauck, Gaetano Borriello, Carl W. Ebeling · 1995
There is a large amount of interest in using multi-FPGA systems for logic emulation and rapid-prototyping of digital systems. One difficulty with this approach is the handling of the external interfaces of the system. In this paper we describe a generic interface transducer, a board capable of handling the external interfaces of the system under prototype, allowing the emulation to operate in the target environment. We also describe how several protocols can be implemented on this board, including NTSC video, digital audio, PCMCIA, and VMEbus. Introduction Logic emulation with FPGAs (the mapping of circuitry to be tested onto a multi-FPGA system) holds the promise of greatly decreasing development times for both ASICs and complete systems. Emulation systems [Tessier94, Thomae91, Varghese93, Yamada94, Zycad94] offer orders of magnitude speedup over software simulation for ASIC designs. There is also work being done to bring similar benefits to board-level and system-level emulation [A...