Dataflow-Based Multi-ASIP Platform Approach for Digital Control Applications

To provide a good balance between the performance and flexibility of future digital control platforms, we propose an FPGA-based heterogeneous multiprocessor approach, in which the platform is composed of processing elements from a set of parameterizable heterogeneous Application-Specific Instruction-set Processors (ASIPs), connected with an hierarchical interconnect. With a case-study treating two different industrial-scale controllers, we show that a platform generated from our template using only a small library of instantiable ASIP types outperforms an optimized 8-core general-purpose implementation by a factor 4.9 on sampling frequency and reduces IO-delay with 37.5%.