Intermediate Fabrics: Virtual Architectures for Near-Instant FPGA Compilation

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) suffer from lower application design productivity than other devices, which is largely due to compilation taking hours or even days. Making FPGA compilation comparable to software compilation is critical for continued FPGA usage due to competitive technologies, such as graphics-processing units, that use languages with runtime compilation models. In this letter, we evaluate virtual reconfigurable architectures, referred to as intermediate fabrics, which enable near-instant placement and routing of applications for commercial FPGAs.