Enhancing FPGA I/O Communication Using Web Services

Abstract

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are increasingly being used for both commercial and educational applications that take advantage of their reconfigurability and computational power. The practice of offloading intensive computations to the FPGA where they can benefit from the computing parallelism and hardware acceleration is burdened by the need to overcome I/O bottlenecks generated by the lack of a fast and easy-to-use interface for transferring data. This paper presents the design and implementation of a service-based solution for interconnecting a PC and an FPGA over the Ethernet that offers a flexible, high-speed link for transferring data using an easy-to-use web interface.