Exploring FPGA Capabilities for Building Symmetric Multiprocessor Systems

Advances in FPGA technologies allow designing highly complex systems using on-chip FPGA resources and intellectual property (IP) cores. Furthermore, it is possible to build multiprocessor systems using hard-core or soft-core processors increasing the range of applications that can be implemented on an FPGA. This paper presents an implementation of a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) system on an FPGA using a vendor provided soft-core processor and a new set of software libraries specially developed for writing applications for this kind of systems. Experimental results show how this approach can improve performance of parallelizable software applications.