THE TRANSMOGRIFIER-2 - A 1 MILLION GATE RAPID-PROTOTYPING SYSTEM

This paper describes the Transmogrifier-2 (TM-2), a second-generation multifield programmable gate array (FPGA) rapid-prototyping system. Th e largest version of the system will comprise 16 boards that each cont ain two Altera 10K50 FPGA's, four I-Cube interconnect chips, and up to 8 Mbytes of memory. The inter-FPGA routing architecture of the TM-2 u ses a novel interconnect structure, a nonuniform partial crossbar, tha t provides a constant delay between any two FPGA's in the system. The TM-2 architecture is modular and scalable, meaning that systems of var ious sizes can be constructed from copies of the same board, while mai ntaining routability and the constant delay feature. Other features in clude a system-level programmable clock that allows single-cycle acces s to off-chip memory, and programmable clock waveforms with edge resol ution of 10 ns. The first Transmogrifier-2 boards have been manufactur ed and are functional. They have recently been used successfully in so me simple graphics acceleration applications.