Accelerating the verification of forward error correction decoders by PCIe FPGA cards

Abstract

Presilicon forward error correction (FEC) decoding hardware is typically designed using hardware description languages (HDLs). Its verification is a hard task due to its intrinsic tendency to correct errors. The generation and injection of millions of random inputs as well as the cross-checking of the corresponding outputs are highly recommended. Using HDL simulations for such work leads to prohibitive execution times. This letter proposes a verification strategy in which the software testbed is executed on a multicore host and the hardware under verification is prototyped on a PCIe accelerator card. Data are transferred in big blocks of codewords over a high-bandwidth PCIe channel and applied to the decoder using a pipeline management to maximize the use of computational resources and minimize the verification time. The decoder is replicated with parallel access to DDRs. OpenMP is used to leverage the parallel capabilities of the host and OpenCL, together with Xilinx Runtime (XRT) Library, to manage the PCIe FPGA card execution. The results show an important speed-up with respect to HDL simulation and to other prototyping approaches.