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Interconnect
High Bandwidth Interconnect for Ease of Timing Closure
The dataCrossconnect (DCC) network is the backbone of the Configurable Switch Array architecture. It consists of an array of switching stations, called DCC stations, connected by high capacity pipes. The DCC network spans the entire device, supporting high bandwidth connections between any functional source and destination, implemented in the logic fabric level of the device. In this way, the DCC network can be thought of as a built-in pipeline grid, simplifying the implementation of high-performance designs. In addition, because it is clocked at a high-speed, parallelization is minimized, supporting high bandwidth connections in a minimal amount of area.
Each DCC station consists of two 4-port switches connected by a 160 Gbps bidirectional fat pipe (see figure above). The upper switch connects a DCC station to 4 adjacent DCC stations via 40 Gbps pipes. The lower switch has four 20-bit ports that can be accessed by the different blocks in its associated tile. The stations are regularly arranged in an array across the device, providing DCC network access to any user function implemented in the fabric plane.
The dataCrossconnect network utlilizes time domain multiplexing to transport data at high speed, and supports all interconnect topologies: point to point, multi-source to single sink (aggregation), and single source to multi-sink (broadcast). Each connection can be thought of as a channel with its own timing requirement that the designer specifies in terms of latency. With the latency and user clock information, the Cswitch design tool (Andara) then automatically places sources and destinations, and configures the DCC stations that are utilized to meet the latency requirement and to properly time the network.
The combination of these features gives the CS90 family enough on-chip bandwidth for the high-speed special-function blocks to communicate with each other, while requiring a much smaller die area than other programmable logic devices with an equivalent bandwidth.
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