Rapid FPGA design prototyping through preservation of system logic: A case study

FPGA designs often contain significant amounts of logic such as a board support package that remains unaltered throughout the design process. However, during normal operation, standard FPGA implementation tools re-implement the entire system, including the unchanged logic, adding to the turn around time of design iterations. Recently, FPGA implementation flows have appeared that allow preserving parts of a previously implemented design. In this study, we evaluate the potential speedups in implementation time achievable through preserving the unchanging portion of a design's implementation. We perform these evaluations using Xilinx Partitions, Xilinx SmartGuide, and the HMFlow rapid implementation tool.