Structured Approach to Dynamic Computing Application Development
Stephen Craven · 2008
The ability of some configurable logic devices to modify their hardware during operation has long held great potential to increase performance and reduce device cost. However, de-spite many research projects and a decade of research, the dynamic reconfiguration of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is still very much an art practiced by few. Previous attempts to automate the many low-level details that complicate Run-Time Reconfigurable (RTR) application development suffer severe limitations. The proposed research describes a comprehensive approach to dynamic hardware development, providing a designer with appropriate models for computation, communication, and reconfiguration integrated with a high-level design environment. In this way, many manual and time consuming tasks asso-ciated with partial reconfiguration may be hidden, permitting a designer to focus instead on a design’s behavior. The proposed approach frees reconfigurable applications from de-pendence on an external configuration controller, generating a configuration manager from a high-level description. The proposed design and implementation environment will enable effective benchmarking of the benefits of partial reconfiguration and high level synthesis.