Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD (대한전자공학회논문지SD)

The Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers (대한전자공학회)
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REGO: REconfiGurable system emulatOr

레고 : 재구성 가능한 시스템 에뮬레이터

  • Kim, Nam-Do (Dept.of Computer Science Engineering, Busan National University) ;
  • Yang, Se-Yang (Dept.of Computer Science Engineering, Busan National University)
  • 김남도 (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학과) ;
  • 양세양 (부산대학교 컴퓨터공학과)
  • Published : 2002.02.01
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Abstract

For massive FPGA based emulator, the interconnection architecture and the transmission method of signals between FPGA's are important elements which decide speed of emulation and extendability of emulator. Existing FPGA-based emulation system is faced the problems of which the emulation speed getting slow drastically as the complexity of circuit increases. In this paper, we proposed a new innovative emulation architecture that has high resource usage rate and makes the fast emulation Possible. The emulator with very unique hierarchical ring topology Presented here has merits to overcome FPGA pin limitation by connecting each FPGA into a set of pipelined rings, and it also makes emulation speed at the tens of MHz at least even at system level where the verification complexity can easily exceed the verification capability of designers.

다수의 FPGA로 구성된 에뮬레이터에서 FPGA간의 연결구조와 신호의 전송방법은 에뮬레이터의 확장성과 검증속도를 결정하는 중요한 요소이다. 기존의 에뮬레이터는 검증 대상이 되는 회로의 크기가 커짐에 비례하여 에뮬레이션의 속도가 현저하게 느려지는 문제점이 있다. 본 논문에서는 자원이용률을 극대화할 수 있을 뿐만 아니라 에뮬레이션의 속도도 크게 높일 수 있는 새로운 에뮬레이터 구조를 제안한다. 제안되는 에뮬레이터는 계층적인 환형 토폴로지 구조를 가지고 파이프라인의 환형으로 FPGA들을 연결하여 FPGA의 핀한곌르 극복하고, 이와 같은 연결구조를 이용하여 다양한 IP들의 통합도 매우 용이하게 함으로써 설계검증 난이도가 설계자의 검증 능력을 쉽게 초과할 수 있는 시스템 수준에서의 검증도 최소한 수십 ㎒ 속도의 에뮬레이션으로 효과적으로 가능하게 한다.

Keywords

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