An FPGA-based Experiment Platform for Hardware-Software Codesign and Hardware Emulation

Abstract — With increasing number of hardware-software systems, there is a need for mechanisms to assist with the efficient design and verification of such systems. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have evolved to provide a practical experimentation and verification platform for emulation of hardware without the non-recurring engineering (NRE) costs of ASIC hardware. In this paper we describe in detail the design of a platform and it’s applications in the domains of hardware-software codesign and computer architecture experimentation. This FPGA-based platform is developed for use in research and as a platform for education. In our current system we exploit the combination of an FPGA and a microcontroller to create a user friendly platform. The boards we have designed are compact and consist of only essential components required for FPGA configuration and hardware emulation. The configuration is done via a slave-serial method and does not require expensive vendor cables or hardware for programming the FPGA. The platform is also targeted for use in an academic environment, where students can experiment with different concepts of computer architecture, within the time frame of a semester. Index Terms — FPGA, hardware-software codesign, computer architecture, prototyping, educatio