A placement management circuit for efficient realtime hardware reuse on FPGAs targeting reliable autonomous systems
Godwin Enemali, Adewale Adetomi, Tughrul Arslan · 2017
Reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs offer promising platform for the development of embedded autonomous systems. This is due to their unique combination of high performance and flexibility. However, state-of-the-art FPGAs have large reconfiguration time, which often leads to missed deadlines in real-time systems. They also suffer from considerable fragmentation during runtime placement, leading to poor chip area utilization. In this paper, we present a novel hardware-placement management circuit to address these limitations by offering circuit reuse and a low-cost defragmentation. Its implementation occupies only 1852 FPGA slices. Our results showed that over 70% of configuration time was circumvented compared to state-of-the-art techniques. In addition, up to 56% improvement in reuse efficiency was observed.