A scalable architecture to support networked reconfiguration
Yajun Ha, Patrick R. Schaumont, Luc Rijnders, Serge Vernalde, Marc Engels, Hugo De Man · 1999
This paper presents a proposed scalable architecture to enable networked reconfiguration for the next generation communication terminals. A new system architecture that supports networked reconfiguration is defined. It contains two new blocks - the virtual reconfigurable architecture (VRA) and the application specific resource manager (ASRM). VRA can be considered as a hardware virtual machine, and it separates the terminal architecture into application independent and application specific parts. ASRM is used to automatically manage FPGA resources similar to the way a conventional OS manages memory or CPU resources. By providing both a hardware and a software virtual machine, the networked reconfiguration users only need to develop a design description targeted on the virtual platform that exploits VRA and ASRM.