The FPGA 'fullness' does not matter. FPGA bitfile sizes are based
only on the size of the FPGA itself. So a LabVIEW FPGA product with a
Virtex 5 LX110 FPGA will take longer than a product with a Virtex 5
LX30 FPGA. You can see the Virtex 5 FPGA bitfile sizes (aka
configuration memory) in the product table at the following link. They
are on the order of a few megabytes.
http://www.xilinx.com/publications/prod_mktg/V5_LX__TXT_psm_table.pdf
PXI
LabVIEW FPGA products (like FlexRIO and 784x/5x, etc.) can load the
FPGA via the PXI interface (33 MHz x 32 bits). I'm not aware of
characterization data for FPGA load time via PXI/PCI, but I think its
in the 100's of ms range. Rough calcs support this, for example:
An
LX50 bitfile = 12.6 Mb = 412877 x 32-bit words. If we assume it takes
10-15 33MHz (30 ns) cycles to write each word, then the total config
time would be around 200 ms. The LX110 would be around 1/2 second with
these assumptions. These are rough numbers, there will be some
software overhead, but I think this is the correct order of magnitude.
Note - PXI/PCI bus traffic can affect the load time.
I think you can safely assume FPGA download will be at most a few seconds (as long as the PXI bus is available).
