An FPGA-Based Emulation Platform For Optical-Enabled System

This paper introduces an FPGA-based emulation platform for optical-enabled computer system researches. As electrical links are reaching their physical limits, optical technologies begin increasingly to play a role in computer systems by enabling high speed IO, optical memory extension and system bus links. With its excellent latency, bandwidth, power and scalability performance, optical links will move steadily closer to the processor in the future. New design challenges and tradeoffs must be considered at the system level to make a balanced and efficient system from both power and cost perspectives. With an IO-centric research methodology in mind, we try to explore the broad design space of optical-enabled computer systems by implementing an FPGA-based emulation platform as the research vehicle. On this platform, high speed IO device is connected to an FPGA-based IO controller through optical fiber and the IO controller talks to the FPGA-based synthesizable processor core via PCIe link. With the in-field-configuration characteristic of FPGA, it gives us the freedom to modify both the CPU part and the IO part of the emulated system. The first system implementation is up and running with the an example application at this stage.