Chained backplane communication architecture for scalable multiprocessor systems

A scalable backplane topology which allows a practically unlimited number of modules with identical interfaces is presented. Short, buffered, point-to-point connections overcome clock skew problems. Synchronized, pipelined data transfer operations ensure high throughput and reasonably low latency times for fine-grain parallel algorithms. A simple bus interface logic without any special hardware configuration guarantees a cheap implementation with standard FPGAs. The measured performance in our FPGA based prototype with 32 bit wide data bus shows a throughput of 160 Mbytes/s for each module with 75 ns latency time between modules.