Fight Club: Automated vs.

Hand Crafted Pin

Multiplexing
blogs.synopsys.com /breakingthethreelaws/2015/02/fight-club-automated-vs-hand-crafted-pinmultiplexing/
Posted by Michael Posner on February 27th, 2015
This week a prototyping
engineer challenged me that
his customized and hand
crafted pin multiplexing
capability was better than the
HAPS High Speed TimeDomain Multiplexing, HSTDM.
My response, Faster, maybe,
better NO. This blog explains
why the HAPS HSTDM
capability will beat out a
custom coded multiplexing
capability hands down every
time.
First lets list of the positives
and negatives of a custom
coded pin multiplexing
capability
Positives
Its tailored to the exact design requirements
Its tuned for a specific set of FPGA pins and inter-FPGA connections to push performance to the
limits
Negatives
Its hand crafted meaning effort to develop
It has to be manually inserted into the design
It breaks if the design requirements change
Its tuned so will need to be customized to different FPGA pins and inter-FPGA connections
Might be unreliable leading to mystery ghost bugs to chase down
I am sure the list of negatives is longer but I would bet that you already get the idea. While its possible to
craft a pin-multiplexing block that eeks out every possible drip of performance the overhead of insertion,
modification to different design and hardware requirements and testing makes it inferior to the HAPS
HSTDM capability.

HAPS
HSTDM was
designed to
deliver an
automated,
cycle
accurate,
highest

performance, reliable, modular and scalable pin multiplexing solution for the HAPS systems. Automated
insertion through ProtoCompiler ensures that the usage is as unobtrusive as possible. HAPS HSTDM is
tested to run on every qualified IO pin across the HAPS-70 system. It will reliably run on any HAPS
platform, we can claim this as the HAPS hardware itself is performance tested as part of the production
manufacturing tests ensuring that all systems and interconnects meet the minimum required performance
for HSTDM operation. It supports multiple ratios meeting the need of many different design requirements.
It is very high performance using the latest differential signaling and training techniques with built in error
detection. Just looking at this list its clear that HAPS HSTDM has many advantages over custom.
But wait, there is more. I would challenge that using the flexible capabilities of the HAPS hardware
interconnect combined with the HAPS HSTDM capabilities that the overall HAPS prototype will run at a
higher system performance. Ive talked about this capabilities a couple of times. The HAPS systems do not
have any dedicated PCB traces between FPGAs. All interconnect is done via intelligent cabling. This
method enables the HAPS hardware to be customized to better match the DUTs interconnect needs. This
means you can create more interconnect density where the DUT needs it. More dense interconnect can
help reduce the overall pin multiplexing ratio required resulting in higher performance system operation.
Remember your prototype is only as fast as the slowest link.

This HAPS
flexible
interconnect
combined
with the
HAPS
HSTDM
automated
and
deployed by

ProtoCompiler is a very powerful solution and this is why I claim that its better than a hand crafted
scheme.
Do you
agree?