Developing portable FPGA applications - A literature review

Abstract

Industrial applications from areas like automation, process control, or power controls have a very long-life time up-to 30 years or even more. Supporting applications developed for such life-times cannot rely on the availability of the hardware the application was originally developed on. Especially FPGA families are updated approximately every 12-18th months. This presents a major challenge if functionality in such long-living applications has to be realized on FPGAs (e.g. for performance reasons): How to avoid considerable re-development efforts when replacing obsolete hardware? Concepts for developing portable FPGA applications that can be easily migrated to new hardware are of crucial importance to answer this challenge. In this paper we review and evaluate different approaches for developing portable FPGA applications.