Filling the largest FPGA changes the problem. Logic must cross package boundaries, and every new boundary introduces SerDes links, clock domains, protocols, pipelines, latency, placement, routing, synchronization, power, and engineering cost.

Brian Greenforest’s Cartilage architecture turns that custom integration burden into a scalable fabric with one programming model.

Crossing the Package Boundary Changes Everything

A design that once shared one clock and routing graph now needs explicit communication between devices. Teams trade clock ambition for pipeline depth, design protocols, distribute time, and partition state around physical links.

At rack scale, two kilowatts across 36 units can disappear quickly. Linux, RISC-V, Kubernetes, orchestration libraries, and custom glue then multiply the levels an engineering team must maintain.

Scale the Fabric Instead of Rebuilding the Cluster

Cartilage organizes pure reconfigurable nodes through local links, dynamic placement, and a hardware runtime. Adding hardware expands the same machine instead of creating another separately administered island.

Organizations facing multi-FPGA complexity can bring their partitioning problem into this architecture. The goal is direct: save billions of engineering hours and make reconfigurable clusters scale.

Map Multi-FPGA Structure in Cartilage

Cartilage Visual Language makes distributed modules, boundaries, and interconnect visible when one FPGA can no longer contain the complete machine.

Cartilage Visual Language

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Brian Greenforest · Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 11:20:51 AM PDT (2022-05-11 18:20:51 UTC)

LinkedIn status when archived: Edited · Visible to anyone on or off LinkedIn.

When you fill up your entire largest FPGA, when you have to break away from one single chip package, when you have to partition your logic, and lower your clock ambition or redesign your latency expectations, work on SerDeses, pipelines, protocols, clock distribution networks, and time synchronization, often using GPS clock sources.... When you have to buy one more server rack, because you've used up all 2 kilowatts in their 36 units already.... When your engineers ask to use RISC-V, ARM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, IBM, because they can't manage the complexity and dynamic models in their FPGAs... When they have to use Linux, Charm++, Kubernetes, parallel execution orchestration libraries and custom code on many levels of abstraction... Simply, when you have to pay your talent for the duration of the project MUCH MORE than your entire hardware will cost with all its upgrades for the next 5 years.... That's where we need to talk. I'm a liberator who wants to save billions of engineering hours spent on custom FPGA coding, architecture, bugs, code from scratch over and over.... I want to help you to make your FPGA cluster deployments SCALE. Because I know how to. Because I also know that nobody on Earth does know how to scale bare pure FPGAs without Linuxes glueing them. Without a complete redesign of a fixed-size server rack. I know something that nobody else does, and I do want to help.