Relocation-aware communication network for circuits on Xilinx FPGAs
Adewale Adetomi, Godwin Enemali, Tughrul Arslan · 2017
The parallelism of hardware and the dynamic reconfigurability of FPGAs enable multiple hardware tasks to run concurrently, and also time-share resources by being swapped in and out of the device during runtime. More than ever before, these capabilities are being employed in systems with high-reliability requirements. To improve reliability, a method often used is circuit relocation. However, the static nature of conventional FPGA communication interconnects is a bane to flexible runtime relocation. This paper employs a novel network architecture to enable dynamic communication and thus improve the flexibility of circuit relocation. By using the clock infrastructure of the FPGA as the physical network links for tasks in a 4-node star network, we have shown that dynamic communication between relocatable circuits can be achieved without incurring any overheads of time and resources, save for only 32 slices used for the Network Interface.