Performance Comparison between Multi-FPGA Prototyping Platforms: Hardwired Off-the-Shelf, Cabling, and Custom

Abstract

We can classify multi-FPGA prototyping platforms in three categories: hardwired off-the-shelf, cabling and custom. Three points are developed in this paper. Firstly, an automatic design flow is proposed to generate a cabling platform and a custom platform for a given design. Then, the optimal width of cables for a cabling multi-FPGA platform is explored. Finally, the performances of these three multi-FPGA platforms are compared. The results show that the cabling platform achieves up to 82% gain in performance, and the custom platform achieves up to 100%, compared to the hardwired off-the-shelf platform. The custom platform achieves up to 20% gain in performance over the cabling platform. Therefore the results show that, apart from some stringent constraints (such as deployment cost or specific frequency needed), the relatively new cabling paradigm with the proposed automatic, inter-FPGA tracks distribution tool, offers an attractive alternative compared to the two other platforms.