Partially Reconfigurable Point-to-Point Interconnects in Virtex-II Pro FPGAs

Conventional rigid router-based networks on chip incur certain overheads due to huge occupied logic resources and topology embedding, i.e., the mapping of a logical network topology to a physical one. In this paper, we present an implementation of partially reconfigurable point-to-point (p-P2P) interconnects in FPGA to overcome the mentioned overheads. In the presented implementation, arbitrary topologies are realized by changing the p-P2P interconnects. In our experiments, we considered parallel merge sort and Cannon's matrix multiplication to generate network traffic to evaluate our implementation. Furthermore, we have implemented a 2D-mesh packet switched network to serve as a reference to compare our results with. Our experiment shows that the utilization of on-demand p-P2P interconnects performs 2× better and occupies 70% less area compared to the reference mesh network. Furthermore, the reconfiguration latency is significantly reduced using the Xilinx module-based partial reconfiguration technique. Finally, our experiments suggest that higher performance gains can be achieved as the problem size increases.