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On FPGA-platforms, the feature of dynamic partial reconfiguration offers a wide range of applications. We propose a new formal method for design, analysis, and verification of the reconfiguration process on such devices. The π-calculus, also known as the calculus of mobile processes, is a type of process algebra typically used to describe dynamic communicating processes. We propose the π-calculus as a foundation to model dynamic partial reconfiguration of hardware modules. A subset of this calculus that we call tiny-π can be executed in resourcerestricted, embedded environments which feature reconfiguration properties. As a proof-of-concept, we present a small virtual machine implementation for tiny-π. We have also implemented a compilation flow from a textual description of tiny-π specifications into executable bytecode. The virtual machine, running on an embedded Microblaze processor on an FPGA, can execute the bytecode and trigger corresponding reconfiguration commands for a dynamically reconfigurable FPGA platform.

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Self-healing systems can restore their original functionality by use of run-time self-reconfiguration, a feature supplied by state of the art FPGA devices. Commonly, integrity checks are performed by reading back the device configuration and validating its hash value. Systems which are prone to tampering and piracy of intellectual property may disable configuration readback, which renders this method infeasible. We propose to secure systems by use of test vectors, requiring a certain system input sequence to always generate the same system output. The presented security mechanism is hard to tamper with and does not interfere with normal system operation. Although the required hardware overhead may be high in general, we show that the overhead can be kept relatively low if the method is applied only to select parts of the system, without any detrimental effect to the level of security that our mechanism provides. The mechanism is introduced into VHDL code using an automatic process. This approach to self-test and self-healing has been implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-5 device.