PATIS: Using partial configuration to improve static FPGA design productivity

Reconfigurable hardware development and debugging tools aspire to provide software-like productivity. A major impediment, however, is the lack of a module linkage capability permitting hardware blocks to be compiled concurrently, limiting the effective use of multi-core and multiprocessor platforms. Although modular and incremental design flows can reuse the layouts of unmodified blocks, non-local changes to the logical hierarchy or physical layout, or addition of debug circuitry, generally force complete re-implementation. We describe the PATIS dynamic floorplanner, targeting development environments in which some circuit speed and area optimization may be sacrificed for improved implementation and debug turnaround. The floorplan consists of partial modules with structured physical interfaces observable through configuration readback rather than synthesized logic analysis circuitry, allowing module ports to be passively probed without disturbing the layout. Although PATIS supports incremental design, complete re-implementation is still rapid because the partial bitstream for each block is generated by independent and concurrent invocations of the standard Xilinx tools running on separate cores or hosts. A continuous background task proactively generates floorplan variants to accelerate global layout changes. The partial reconfiguration design flow is easier to automate in PATIS because run-time module swapping is not required, suggesting that partial reconfiguration may serve a useful role in large-scale static design.