A Self-reconfiguring Platform

Abstract

Abstract.A self-reconfiguring platform is reported that enables an FPGA to dynamically reconfigure itself under the control of an embedded microprocessor. This platform has been implemented on Xilinx Virtex II¦ § and Virtex II Pro¦ © § devices. The platform's hardware architecture has been designed to be lightweight. Two APIs (Application Program Interface) are described which abstract the low level configuration interface. The Xilinx Partial Reconfiguration Toolkit (XPART), the higher level of the two APIs, provides methods for reading and modifying select FPGA resources. It also provides support for relocatable partial bitstreams. The presented self-reconfiguring platform enables embedded applications to take advantage of dynamic partial reconfiguration without requiring external circuitry.

Design methodology for partial dynamic reconfiguration: a new degree of freedom in the HW/SW codesign

“…This is particularly true for systems that implement self partial reconfiguration [5][6][7][8][9][10]. In partial reconfiguration, only portions of the reconfigurable device are involved by the configuration change.…”

“…When both these features are available, the FPGA is called partially dynamically reconfigurable. Although there are several techniques to exploit partial reconfiguration (e. g. [6,17,18]), there are only a few aprroaches for frameworks and tools (e. g. [8,10,[17][18][19]) to design dynamically reconfigurable System on Programmable Chip,SoPC (e. g. [20][21][22]). Examples of such frameworks are the operating systems for reconfigurable embedded platforms which have been analyzed in [23].…”

A Reconfigurable Baseband Transmitter for Adaptive Image Coding

“…This implies to interconnect the µBlaze to the ICAP internal configuration interface. This kind of reconfiguration of the FPGA by an processor (µBlaze) embedded in the FPGA is called self-reconfiguration or autoreconfiguration [7]. In this case, small partial bitstreams are stored inside the FPGA, and the use of auto-configuration lets free the other HW resources of the platform.…”

On-chip and on-line self-reconfigurable adaptable platform: the non-uniform cellular automata case

“…The main drawback of these partial bitstreams is that they must be pre-placed and routed on a workstation, restricting the number of reconfigurable systems to a predefined value. An attempt for allowing a platform to self-reconfigure with a design description conceived on the fly has been proposed [4]: XPART (Xilinx Partial Reconfiguration Toolkit) is an application program interface (API), for Xilinx embedded processors, that provides methods to read and modify selected FPGA resources by using the ICAP. Anyway, XPART was never released.…”