Cascade communications between fpga tiles

Abstract

A tile of an FPGA provides memory, arithmetic functions, or both. Connections directly between multiple instances of the tile are available, allowing multiple tiles to be treated as larger memories or arithmetic circuits. By using these connections, referred to as cascade inputs and outputs, the input and output bandwidth of the arithmetic and memory circuits are increased, operand sizes are increased, or both. By using the cascade connections, multiple tiles can be used together as a single, larger tile. Thus, implementations that need memories of different sizes, arithmetic functions operating on different sized operands, or both, can use the same FPGA without additional programming or waste. Using cascade communications, more tiles are used when a large memory is needed and fewer tiles are used when a small memory is needed and the waste is avoided.