Homogeneous NoC-based FPGA: The Foundation for Virtual FPGA

Abstract

Reconfigurable computing based on FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) has been a promising solution to improve the performance with high flexibility. However, the physical capacity limitation of FPGAs prevents its wide adoption in real world. In this paper, a homogeneous NoC-based FPGA architecture is proposed, in which reconfigurable and I/O resources are interconnected via NoC so that reconfigurable modules can be placed anywhere once enough space available. Meanwhile, a virtual FPGA is proposed with which over large circuit can be implemented on a limited capacity FPGA. The experiment verified that our approach can provide more flexible reconfiguration, and combing NOC on FPGA, the resource utilization increased within 44.7%-53.5% because of the fragment in CRs benefit from such kind of dynamic partial configuration.