Partial reconfiguration on FPGAs in practice – tools and applications

Abstract

Run-time reconfiguration of FPGAs has been around in academia for more than two decades but it is still applied very seldom in industrial applications. This has two main reasons: a lack of killer applications that substantially benefit from run-time reconfiguration and design tools that permit to quickly implement corresponding reconfigurable systems. This tutorial gives a survey on state-of-the-art trends on reconfigurable architectures and devices, application specific requirements, and design techniques and tools that are essential for implementing partial run-time reconfiguration on FPGAs. This is followed by a demonstration of the floorplanning and constraint generation tool GoAhead. Furthermore, the tutorial will reveal several applications that benefit from partial reconfiguration, including network data processing, digital signal processing, cognitive radio, and systems on a reconfigurable chip. For these applications, the individual challenges and implementation issues are presented together with the achieved results. This tutorial demonstrates that partial FPGA reconfiguration is beneficial and applicable in industrial systems.