Abstract-Nowadays, multi-core systems-on-chip (SoCs) are typically required to execute multiple complex applications, which demand a large set of heterogeneous hardware cores with different sizes. In this context, the popularity of dynamically reconfigurable platforms is growing, as they increase the ability of the initial design to adapt to future modifications. This paper presents a design flow to efficiently map multiple multi-core applications on a dynamically reconfigurable SoC. The proposed methodology is tailored for a reconfigurable hardware architecture based on a flexible communication infrastructure, and exploits applications similarities to obtain an effective mapping. We also introduce a run-time mapper that is able to introduce new applications that were not known at design-time, preserving the mapping of the original system. We apply our design flow to a real-world multimedia case study and to a set of synthetic benchmarks, showing that it is actually able to extract similarities among the applications, as it achieves an average improvement of 29% in terms of reconfiguration latency with respect to a communication-oriented approach, while preserving the same communication performance.Index Terms-Field programmable gate arrays, platformbased design, reconfigurable architectures, run-time adaptability.
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become promising mapping fabric for the implementation of System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms, due to their large capacity and their enhanced support for dynamic and partial reconfigurability. Design automation support for partial reconfigurability includes several key challenges. In particular, reconfiguration algorithms need to be developed to effectively exploit the available area and run-time reconfiguration support for instantiating at run-time the hardware components needed to execute multiple applications concurrently. These new algorithms must be able to achieve maximum application execution performance at a minimum reconfiguration overhead.In this work, we propose a novel design flow that minimizes the amount of core reconfigurations needed to map multiple applications dynamically (i.e., using run-time reconfiguration) on FPGAs. This new mapping flow features a multi-stage design optimization algorithm that makes it possible to reduce the reconfiguration latency up to 43%, by taking into account the reconfiguration costs and SoC block reuse between the different applications that need to be executed dynamically on the FPGA. Moreover, we show that the proposed multi-stage optimization algorithm explores a large set of mapping trade-offs, by taking into account the traffic flows for each application, the run-time reconfiguration costs and the number of reconfigurable regions available on the FPGA.
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