100 Power Tips for FPGA Designers by Stavinov Evgeni

Author:Stavinov, Evgeni [Stavinov, Evgeni]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Computing, Internet
Publisher: OutputLogic.com
Published: 2011-05-17T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 1: Intel Atom emulation platform (source: “Intel Atom processor core made FPGA-synthesizable”, Microarchitecture Research Lab, Intel corporation)

This platform is not available for general use, and is shown as an example of a custom platform.

Build vs. Buy

Modern high-end FPGAs certainly make the task of designing a custom hardware acceleration platform realistic. Several high-end FPGAs have enough capacity, user IOs, and embedded memory to emulate small to medium-size ASIC designs.

Building a custom FPGA-based hardware acceleration platform can offer a significantly higher emulation speed approaching the maximum speed that an FPGA supports. In some cases running the emulation at 200-300MHz is a realistic expectation.

A custom-built platform can have features or capabilities that commercial platforms don’t provide. For example, a custom-built platform can have a very high amount of external memory, a particular communication interface such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, or a specific connectivity between FPGAs.

The main disadvantage of building a custom platform is significant design and bring-up time and effort. A hardware acceleration platform has a very short life cycle, from a few months to a year. By using an off-the-shelf platform, engineering teams can focus on ASIC design verification, rather than on building a short-lived platform.

Also, there is no definitive answer as to which approach is cheaper. There are several factors that affect the cost: the complexity of the custom-build platform, engineering effort, and the number of units to be manufactured.

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