AN 802: Intel® Stratix® 10 SoC Device Design Guidelines

ID 683117
Date 8/05/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

3.1.2. Lightweight HPS-to-FPGA Bridge

GUIDELINE: Use the lightweight HPS-to-FPGA bridge to connect IP that needs to be controlled by the HPS.

The lightweight HPS-to-FPGA bridge allows masters in the HPS to access memory-mapped control slave ports in the FPGA portion of the SoC device. Typically, only the MPU inside the HPS accesses this bridge to perform control and status register accesses to peripherals in the FPGA.

GUIDELINE: Do not use the lightweight HPS-to-FPGA bridge for FPGA memory. Instead use the HPS-to-FPGA bridge for memory.

When the MPU accesses control and status registers within peripherals, these transactions are typically strongly ordered (non-posted). By dedicating the lightweight HPS-to-FPGA bridge to only register accesses, the access time is minimized because bursting traffic is routed to the HPS-to-FPGA bridge instead. The lightweight HPS-to-FPGA bridge has a fixed 32-bit width connection to the FPGA fabric because most IP cores implement 32-bit control and status registers; but Platform Designer can adapt the transactions to widths other than 32 bits within the interconnect generated in the FPGA portion.