May 20, 2010 -- The ever-increasing complexity of FPGAs enables even modestly sized companies to design complex systems-on-reconfigurable-chips. The traditional way of designing complex systems is based on a variant of the waterfall methodology and involves the integration of all components near the end of the project, prior to system testing. Many unexpected problems occur in the process of integrating the system, including incompatible component interfaces, contention for shared resources or inability to fit the system on the predetermined FPGA. Especially since integration is done with approaching deadlines (or even well after deadlines have been missed), it is mission critical to make this process as observable and controllable as possible.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a technique, borrowed from software engineering and reminiscent of ancient Japanese temple building. It turns the final system integration into a non-event. Instead of figuring out how to integrate all components near the end of a project, all components are integrated on a regular basis, for instance every day. This way, final integration will be a simple repetition of a well known process. Using continuous integration, the final phases of a project are more predictable.

This article elaborates on the advantages of continuous integration for FPGA SOC projects, reports on real-world usage of CI for the design of a scalable video decoder and provides some guidelines for setting up a new continuous integration system.

By Philippe Faes and Hendrik Eeckhaut. (Faes and Hendrik Eeckhaut are with Sigasi.)