Evaluation of high-speed FPGA IO for inter-board communication

Growing demand for computation power requires high speed interconnects between FPGA devices. While there are multiple solutions available it is still challenging to choose one suited for the particular task. Is it therefore extremely import for both academic and industrial purposes to have access to real world performance evaluation of high speed interconnect technologies commonly offered on FPGAs. In this thesis we study the feasibility of high-speed interconnect and find that it is most relevant to evaluate the performance of LVDS and dedicated transceivers for board-to-board communication scenario. To address this requirement we design evaluation of a system implemented in Altera Cyclone V devices and conduct measurements of the transmission performance and resource usage. LVDS inter-board communication was implemented as point-to-point topology between two FPGA boards. The maximum received data rate is 823 Mbps per channel. On the base of the transceiver interface, the chain topology was created for communication of three devices. The maximum measured speed in the transceiver system is 1822 Mbps. The average logic utilization of the designs is about 3% of the FPGA resources. At the same time, 38% of the global clocks are used in the transceiver design. On the base of the performed experiments, we conclude that required high-speed interconnection can be implemented by establishing FPGA-to-FPGA communication via LVDS and the dedicated transceivers interfaces