A dynamic partial reconfigurable overlay concept for PYNQ
Benedikt Jansen, Pascal Zimprich, Michael K. Hubner · 2017
Partial reconfiguration is a promising technique in the design of embedded systems since it enables an increase in efficiency and flexibility. However, its usage is still challenging due to the constraints of current FPGAs. In this paper, we present an extension of the Xilinx Python package ‘pynq’ to ease the usage of partial reconfigurable bitstreams. The pynq package belongs to Xilinx's open source project PYNQ. The PYNQ project provides the Python language and its libraries to developers on the Xilinx Zynq. Our pynq package extension enables the usage of partial reconfigurable bitstreams. The concept is based on our Python package ‘pynqpartial’. This package can be integrated into an overlay for PYNQ to enable support for partial reconfigurable bitstreams. Our goal is to enable overlay developers to offer overlays which manage the partial reconfiguration transparent to the Python programmer. We evaluated our approach on the PYNQ-Z1.