A rapid prototyping environment for distributed reconfigurable systems

In the last decade FPGAs have emerged as the ultimate solution to reduce the time to market and ensure a long time on the market for digital products. Although the design time of applications in FPGAs is still shorter than those of ASICs, programming FPGAs is still a complex exercise reserved to electrical and electronics engineers. Programming FPGAs requires quite a long time to learn and understand the CAD tools. This limits the use of FPGA in other fields like mechanical engineering and computer science which could benefit from the advantages of those devices. For this purpose, simple and efficient design tools are required for people working in other fields and willing to use FPGAs to solve some problems. We present a new design environment called CoreMap, for prototyping and programming on distributed reconfigurable systems. The CoreMap provides the possibility to implement circuits in FPGA with out knowledge of hardware design and CAD tools. In contrast to many tools which seek the same objective, the CoreMap does not generate a HDL code to be compiled by a CAD tool. The CoreMap processes a combined placement and core-based synthesis to implement dataflow graphs in FPGAs. CoreMap also uses techniques based on the computation of eigenvalues to partition and place large designs temporally on one FPGA or spatially on more FPGAs.