Future FPGA Architectures for the Cloud

It is a possible that a future generation of FPGA devices will be developed specialised for server blades in the cloud. The user logic will connect to the outside world only through a service network. Kiwi HLS uses such a NoC for O/S access, as does LEAP. But reconfigurable interconnection between adjacent zones that jointly host an application (blue) might be provided. Having the service network hardened makes it about 100-fold more area efficient, allowing much more complexity, security and monitoring.

The local memory devices would also provide virtualisation assistance in their hardened controllers.

Putative block diagram for a cloud-oriented FPGA for scientific acceleration in the future.

A simple NoC does not take up much FPGA resources, but the ideal NoC would probably support credit-based flow control and also include support for virtualisation.