I/O and performance tradeoffs with the FunctionBus during multi-FPGA partitioning
Frank Vahid · 1997
We improve upon a new approach for automatically partitioning a system among several FPGAs. 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 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 using (I/O) the FunctionBus takes such reduction even further. In particular, performance and I/0can be traded-off by varying the bus size, as demonstrated using several examples.