Accelerator Functional Unit Developer’s Guide for Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card

ID 683129
Date 7/20/2020
Public
Document Table of Contents

5.3.2.4. Partial Reconfiguration Design Guidelines

  • You must generate the AF bitstream using the $OPAE_PLATFORM_ROOT/bin/run.sh script.
  • Partial reconfiguration switches the PR region from one AFU to another AFU. Any software application exercising an AFU in the PR region should be terminated before initiating PR with OPAE to switch in a new AFU. This includes the remote debug feature.
  • After PR, the default initial state of the registers and the contents of the MLABs and M20Ks in the PR region are indeterminate. To establish, a known initial condition for synchronous elements in the AFU, follow the guidelines below:
    • Design registers with reset logic sensitive to the FIU’s pck_cp2af_softReset output. Do not rely on RTL initial value assignments or initial blocks.
    • Initialize MLAB and M20K contents using .mif files or RTL encoded values. Please refer to the Intel Quartus Prime Pro Edition Handbook Volume 1 Design and Compilation document for inferring or instantiating memory with initialized contents.
  • The PR region must contain only core resources such as LABs, RAMs and DSPs. PLLs and Clock control blocks cannot be instantiated in the PR region.
  • The placement and routing of a given AFU can vary between OPAE SDK releases and different OPAE hardware platform targets. Use seed sweeps for large resources or routing-intensive designs.
  • If PR compilation results in timing violations in the FIM static region, retry PR compilation with a different fitter seed value.