HES Proto-AXI Interconnect

FPGA boards are proving increasingly popular in a variety of sectors and for varied applications. For instance, they can be used for ASIC and SoC prototyping, for accelerating algorithms in high performance computing (HPC), for hardware-accelerated computer vision, and for high frequency trading (HFT) on the stock markets.

 

Typically, the FPGA is not a stand-alone component. Rather, it works with another machine, which will be called the Host in this article, and communication is via a Host-FPGA bridge.

 

There are also some other hardware resources on the FPGA board such as external memories (DDR, QDR, RLD) and/or high-speed networking interfaces (like QSFP) that often play a key role in the application and which require reliable and robust controllers in the FPGA.

 

Designing the host bridge and peripheral controllers is not an easy task and takes a considerable amount of time; time that could be better spent on the development of core functionality and innovative features.

 

Addressing these needs, Aldec provides HES Proto-AXI™ Interconnect, a complete and ready-to-use external connectivity and bridge solution. Our HES Proto-AXI is based on the AMBA AXI4 bus standard and facilitates the quick integration of the design in FPGA, with either an external host computer or an embedded ARM Cortex host and various types of on-board memory components. Besides standardized and universal AXI4 interface, the HES Proto-AXI has a high bandwidth and low latency link enabling fast DMA data transfers between software and hardware; reaching a throughput of 10GB/s for read and 5.5GB/s for write operations over PCI Express gen4.

 

Our HES Proto-AXI allows for the connection of multiple design modules or algorithm accelerator that can be both master and/or slave types of AXI4 memory-mapped devices. All these devices can transfer data with one another and to on-board memory thanks to an AXI interconnect contained in the HES Proto-AXI module.

 

The memory map of AXI Interconnect can be modified via address remappers. There are also GPIO and Interrupt (INT) lanes included in the HES Proto-AXI IP that can be used to implement non-standard interfaces or to transfer notifications, status or configuration data to software without using AXI protocol. The largest designs, especially those in the large scale HPC applications, will benefit from multi-FPGA and multi-board support.

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Key Features & Benefits

 

Deliverables



Printed version of site: www.aldec.com/en/solutions/prototyping/hes_proto_axi_interface