Target architecture oriented high-level synthesis for multi-FPGA based emulation

This paper presents a new approach on combined high-level synthesis and partitioning for FPGA-based multi-chip emulation systems. The goal is to synthesize a prototype with maximal performance under the given area and interconnection constraints of the target architecture. Interconnection resources are handled similarly to functional resources, enabling the scheduling and the sharing of inter-chip connections according to their delay. Moreover, data transfer serialization is performed completely or partially, depending on the mobility of the data transfers, in order to satisfy the given interconnection constraints. In contrast to conventional partitioning approaches, the constraints of the target architecture are fulfilled by construction.