BITMAN: A tool and API for FPGA bitstream manipulations
Khoa Dang Pham, Edson Lemos Horta, Dirk Koch · 2017
To fully support the partial reconfiguration capabilities of FPGAs, this paper introduces the tool and API BitMan for generating and manipulating configuration bitstreams. Bit-Man supports recent Xilinx FPGAs that can be used by the ISE and Vivado tool suites of the FPGA vendor Xilinx, including latest Virtex-6, 7 Series, UltraScale and UltraScale− series FPGAs. The functionality includes high-level commands such as cutting out regions of a bitstream and placing or relocating modules on an FPGA as well as low-level commands for modifying primitives and for routing clock networks or rerouting signal connections at run-time. All this is possible without the vendor CAD tools for allowing BitMan to be used even with embedded CPUs. The paper describes the capabilities, API and performance evaluation of BitMan.