Off-Chip and In-Chip Communications for FPGA Systems

While computing is the essence of integrated systems in general, and FPGAs in particular, it is evident that data need to be transported in order to be efficiently computed. For non-data-intensive applications, communications may be neglected, and only computing-related issues are taken into account (computing performance, computing power, computing efficiency). However, for those application that work with large amounts of data (big data applications are the most representative ones), it is clear that communications can be a key factor in the overall performance metrics. It is therefore required, for many applications, to be able to plan both computing and communication resources jointly. Moreover, it might be the case where performance is degraded because of communication overhead.