This paper addresses the communication challenges posed in multi-FPGA systems, by improving a custom FPGA interconnect architecture via the high-speed transceivers available in modern FPGA development boards. The proposed network interconnection, built upon the PlasticNet architecture, is evaluated using the high-speed serial transceiver in Zynq ZC706 FPGA boards. Results show a best-case latency of only 300 ns, demonstrating equivalent results in terms of latency on a par with the known BlueLink framework, but with the plus of having total re-configurability across the different layers of its network interconnection model. This makes the current proposal a competitive option for the development of distributed, heterogeneous multi-FPGA processing systems.

This paper presents preliminary results of Plastic-Net, a custom FPGA interconnect architecture designed for high-processing applications that communicate extensively among multiple FPGAs. PlasticNet allows the interconnection of processing nodes (PNs) through a flexible, reliable and efficient custom protocol, that can be easily integrated in High-Level Synthesis (HLS) modern design environments. The system is evaluated on a ZedBoard Zynq®-7000 ARM/FPGA SoC Development Board, including criteria such as overhead, area, worst-case packet delivery latency and bandwidth. The best evaluated case achieved a half-occupancy latency of 16.9μs. The results show the potential of PlasticNet as an efficient solution for low latency multi-FPGA interconnection.

Buses are central building blocks in the architecture of digital systems. There are numerous standards for bus architectures and evaluation metrics in terms of data transfer rate, quality of service, and latency; however, it is not common to find metrics related to the physical features of bus implementations, such as power consumption and area in terms of their microarchitecture. This paper evaluate bus micro-architectures at pre-synthesis level, allowing for the comparison of alternative circuits implementing the same standard and thus providing estimations on the power consumption and area requirements. A metric is proposed to evaluate the bus implementation and its utilization is shown with generic serial and parallel buses, based on simulations with a 0.18μm CMOS standard cell library.