Multi-FPGA Communication Interface for Electric Circuit Co-Simulation

Real-time simulation of electric circuit is most often used to test real components connected to a real-time simulator. The increasing size and complexity of the simulation as well as the demand for better accuracy, lower time step, have pushed these simulations onto new hardware. For already more than a decade FPGA simulation is used by real-time simulation companies around the world to effectively simulate circuits under the μs. With the computation requirement growth, multi-FPGA simulation needs to be considered as a valuable asset but attention must be given to the latency between the simulations for accuracy and stability. In order to minimize the communication latency, a custom interface and communication architecture for co-FPGA simulation is proposed. This paper presents detailed work on this architecture and shows promising results.