Pipeline morphing and virtual pipelines

Abstract

Abstract. Pipeline morphing is a simple but e ective t e c hnique for recon guring pipelined FPGA designs at run time. By overlapping computation and recon guration, the latency associated with emptying and re lling a pipeline can be avoided. We s h o w h o w morphing can be applied to linear and mesh pipelines at both word-level and bit-level, and explain how this method can be implemented using Xilinx 6200 FPGAs. We also present an approach using morphing to map a large virtual pipeline onto a small physical pipeline, and the trade-o s involved are discussed.

Pebble: A language for parametrised and reconfigurable hardware design

“…4 shows the major elements in our design flow. Synopsys is a well-known industrial system which deals with VHDL synthesis; Velab and XACTstep Series 6000 are implementation tools for Xilinx 6200 FPGAs; and a PCI-based platform [9] for evaluating designs. We have also developed a Library Documentation Tool (LDT), which automatically produces library documentation in various formats such as Postscript and HTML [7].…”

“…To enable video experiments, a real-time video interface has been built for a PCI-based board with a Xilinx 6200 FPGA and two megabytes of memory [9]. Case studies include linear and non-linear filtering, edge detection, image rotation, colour identification and motion detection.…”

Real Time Image Rotation Using Dynamic Reconfiguration

“…Most of the works met in literature [9][10][11][12] made the hypothesis that the user of the FPGA has chosen the solution based on the dynamic reconfiguration and they only tried to help him in the optimization of his implementation. Thus, the paper [9] examined in detail the optimization of the implementation of a pipelined application by using run-time reconfigurable FPGAs.…”

“…However, the paper did not undertake a comparison between the static-configuration-based solution and the run-time-based one, and it did not consider the case where the application does not admit a pipeline. The paper [10] introduces morphing, a technique for enhancing the efficiency of reconfigurable pipelines at run-time. It describes the use of morphing in the emulation of large virtual pipelines by small physical pipelines.…”

Efficient execution on reconfigurable devices using concepts of pipelining

“…As related work, we find PipeRench [5], Pipeline Morphing [6], or a concept to reduce the latency [7]. Those and other works explore the benefits of pipelining with respect to reconfiguration time hiding in detail.…”