Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition User Guide: Platform Designer

ID 683364
Date 12/15/2018
Public
Document Table of Contents

4.1.6. AXI Bridge

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 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 master or slave interfaces. You can also use an AXI bridge to export AXI interfaces from Platform Designer systems.

Reducing the Number of Adapters by Adding a Bridge

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

Figure 117. AXI System Without a Bridge


In this system, Platform Designer interconnect creates four width adapters and four burst adapters to access the two slaves.

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 118. 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.