Virtualrc: A Virtual Fpga Platform For Applications And Tools Portability

Numerous studies have shown significant performance and power benefits of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Despite these benefits, FPGA usage has been limited by application design complexity caused largely by the lack of code and tool portability across different FPGA platforms, which prevents design reuse. This paper addresses the portability challenge by introducing a framework of architecture and middleware for virtualization of FPGA platforms, collectively named VirtualRC. Experiments show modest overhead of 5-6% in performance and 1% in area, while enabling portability of 11 applications and two high-level synthesis tools across three physical platforms.