Case for Fast FPGA Compilation Using Partial Reconfiguration

Despite the FPGA's advantages over other hardware platforms, long compilation time prevents FPGA engineers from efficiently exploring the design space and discourages new users who want to quickly iterate for debugging. To reduce compilation time, this work adopts a divide-and-conquer approach using Partial Reconfiguration with a Packet-Switched Fat-Tree network. Partially reconfigured leaves in the packet-switched network are independent from each other and can be compiled separately in parallel. Also, when a minor fix is required to a bitstream, only the corresponding leaves need to be incrementally compiled. Preliminary experimental evidence from our work-in-progress effort illustrates how a 30 minute full-chip compile time can be reduced to 7 minutes.