Testing of FPGA-based Systems: Challenges & Solutions Alyona Bulda Senior QA Project Manager Exactpro Oleg Pavlikov Senior NFT Analyst Exactpro

Open Access Quality Assurance & Related Software Development for Financial Markets Tel: +7 495 640 24 60 , +1 415 830 38 49 www.exactpro.com 2 Testing of FPGA-Based Systems: Testing of FPGA-Based Systems: Challenges & Solutions Challenges & Solutions Open Access Quality Assurance & Related Software Development for Financial Markets Tel: +7 495 640 2460, +1 415 830 38 49 www.exactpro.com Alyona Bulda, Exactpro Oleg Pavlikov, Exactpro

• Introduction • Why use FPGAs? • FPGA-based systems: the reasons for main QA challenges • The main testing challenges • Fascinating issue types (QA approaches to escalate them and proper QA coverage) • Ways to tackle the challenges • Thank you Testing of FPGA-Based Systems: Challenges & Solutions

Why use FPGAs? • Performance • Throughput • Reliability

FPGA-based systems: the reasons for main QA challenges • Algorithm implementation (partially on hardware and partially on software) • Why is this happening? • to simplify the hardware logic due to its limitation • to find an acceptable combination of various parameters (for example, latency vs. functional complexity) • Logic duplication (same parts of logic have to be implemented on both FPGA and software) • Should QA environments cost a lot?

The main testing challenges • Cost efficient environment is a challenge1 • Maintainability and operability is a challenge2 • Test cases development is a challenge3

Fascinating issue types (QA approach to escalate them and proper QA coverage) • Double coverage SW vs. FPGA parts: • data type representation • data structure implementation • same logic duplication • Data flow processing - issues at the confluence of SW & FPGA • depending on SW, which in certain points can significantly delay FPGA-related processing • when simplifying FPGA logic to reach low latency, certain validation is excluded • different hardware resources can be used by SW and FPGA for the same purposes (for example, source of clock timings)

Ways to tackle the challenges • Environment availability: • low cost FPGA at initial QA processes (which is not always a case due to limitations of implemented logic) • management planning for HW budget

• re-design of the implementation part: • exclude duplication of implementation logic in SW and FPGA • move the whole functionality to FPGA Ways to tackle the challenges

• Maintainability and operability enhancements: • make deployment transparent • the possibility to keep several FPGA firmware versions on the same card • OS driver – ideally, a single version of driver should be used (even if some changes happened in firmware) Ways to tackle the challenges

Thank you