A Structured Methodology for System-on-an-FPGA Design

Increasing logic resources coupled with a proliferation of integrated performance enhancing primitives in high-end FPGAs results in an increased design complexity which requires new methodologies to overcome. This paper presents a structured system based design methodology, centred around the concept of architecture reuse, which aims to increase productivity and exploit the reconfigurability of high-end FPGAs. The methodology is exemplified by the Sonic-on-a-Chip architecture. Preliminary experimental investigations reveal that while the proposed methodology is able to achieve the desired aims, its success would be enhanced if changes were made to existing FPGA fabrics in order to make them better suited to modular design.