Safe and Reusable Approach for Pin to Port Assignment in Multi-Board FPGA Data Acquisition and Control Designs

This article introduces a robust approach for pin-to-port assignment in multiboard field-programmable gate array designs. The problem has been known for a long time and is especially annoying in relatively large data acquisition (DAQ) systems, such as DAQ and control systems for high-energy physics experiments, where hundreds of differential signals are routed via multiple boards. However, there is still no generic user-friendly open-source solution. The proposed approach has two main goals: safety (check as many potential human mistakes as possible) and reusability (reuse connections mappings, defined in files, in multiple designs). The proposed file format description is concise and comprehensible. It is fully declarative, vendor-agnostic, part-agnostic, and programming language-agnostic from the user’s perspective. The article also presents the realization of the idea implemented in the Python language and provides real-life example from the DAQ readout chain for the silicon tracking system for the compressed baryonic matter experiment.