Altera Corporation

Anargyros Krikelis

Michael David Hutton

Martin Roberts

The present invention provides a hybrid programmable logic device which includes a programmable field programmable gate array logic fabric and a many-core distributed processing subsystem. The device integrates both a fabric of programmable logic elements and processors in the same device, i.e., the same chip. The programmable logic elements may be sized and arranged such that place and route tools can address the processors and logic elements as a homogenous routing fabric. The programmable logic elements may provide hardware acceleration functions to the processors that can be defined after the device is fabricated. The device may include scheduling circuitry that can schedule the transmission of data on horizontal and vertical connectors in the logic fabric to transmit data between the programmable logic elements and processor in an asynchronous manner.

Hybrid programmable many-core device with on-chip interconnect

A hybrid programmable logic is described that performs packet processing functions on received data packets using programmable logic elements, and processors interleaved with the programmable logic elements. The header data may be scheduled for distribution to processing threads associated with the processors by the programmable logic elements. The processors may perform packet processing functions on the header data using both the processing threads and hardware acceleration functions provided by the programmable logic elements.

Mapping network applications to a hybrid programmable many-core device

In the provided architecture, one or more multi-threaded processors may be combined with hardware blocks. The resulting combination allows for data packets to undergo a processing sequence having the flexibility of software programmability with the high-performance of dedicated hardware. For example, a multi-threaded processor can control the high-level tasks of a processing sequence, while the computationally intensive events (e.g., signal processing filters, matrix operations, etc.) are handled by dedicated hardware blocks.

Growing community of inventors

Farnham, United Kingdom

Anargyros Krikelis