Facilitating Preemptive Hardware System Design Using Partial Reconfiguration Techniques

Abstract

In FPGA-based control system design, partial reconfiguration is especially well suited to implement preemptive systems. In real-time systems, the deadline for critical task can compel the preemption of noncritical one. Besides, an asynchronous event can demand immediate attention and, then, force launching a reconfiguration process for high-priority task implementation. If the asynchronous event is previously scheduled, an explicit activation of the reconfiguration process is performed. If the event cannot be previously programmed, such as in dynamically scheduled systems, an implicit activation to the reconfiguration process is demanded. This paper provides a hardware-based approach to explicit and implicit activation of the partial reconfiguration process in dynamically reconfigurable SoCs and includes all the necessary tasks to cope with this issue. Furthermore, the reconfiguration service introduced in this work allows remote invocation of the reconfiguration process and then the remote integration of off-chip components. A model that offers component location transparency is also presented to enhance and facilitate system integration.

Formalization of the concept of adaptive tasks mapping in the reconfigurable computers on FPGA

“…Thus, in [12] the method of computational resources reuse in the dynamically reconfigurable computers in the Run Time mode is described. In [2,18], the methods of reconfigurable computational resources placement based on the beforehand reconfiguration are proposed. The overhead problem is localized on the level of the reconfigurable computer structure.…”

“…The desire to increase performance further to the exaflops level makes the challenge to find the new intensive solutions. The dynamically reconfigurable computer systems [2][3][4] are one of such solutions. Their creation became possible on the base of modern technology of the partial dynamic reconfiguration (PDR) of the FPGA [3].…”