Quartus® Prime Pro Edition User Guide: Platform Designer

ID 683609
Date 4/01/2024
Public

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6.1.6. AXI Bridge Intel® FPGA IP

With an AXI bridge, you can influence the placement of resource-intensive components, such as the width and burst adapters. Depending on its use, an AXI bridge may reduce throughput and concurrency, in return for higher fMAX and less logic.

You can use an AXI Bridge Intel® FPGA IP to group different parts of your Platform Designer system. Other parts of the system can then connect to the bridge interface instead of to multiple separate manager or subordinate interfaces. You can also use an AXI bridge to export AXI interfaces from Platform Designer systems.

The AXI bridge also supports ACE-Lite interface signals when enabled on the manager or subordinate side. Platform Designer treats these ACE-Lite interface signals as pass through signals.

The following figure shows a system with a single AXI manager and three AXI subordinates. It also has various interconnect components, such as routers, demultiplexers, and multiplexers. Two of the subordinates have a narrower data width than the manager; 16-bit subordinates versus a 32-bit manager.

Figure 253. AXI System Without a Bridge


In this system, Platform Designer interconnect creates four width adapters and four burst adapters to access the two subordinates. You can improve resource usage by adding an AXI bridge. Then, Platform Designer needs to add only two width adapters and two burst adapters; one pair for the read channels, and another pair for the write channel.

Figure 254. Width and Burst Adapters Added to System With a Bridge




The figure shows the same system with an AXI bridge component, and the decrease in the number of width and burst adapters. Platform Designer creates only two width adapters and two burst adapters, as compared to the four width adapters and four burst adapters in the previous figure. Even though this system includes more components, the overall system performance improves because there are fewer resource-intensive width and burst adapters.