RIFLE-62: a flexible environment for prototyping dynamically reconfigurable systems

Abstract

The paper presents RIFLE-62-a new FPGA based prototyping environment optimised for rapid prototyping of applications exploiting dynamically reconfigurable logic (DRL). RIFLE-62 has a highly flexible architecture based around the Xilinx XC6200 family of dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. The RIFLE-62 experimental board further provides two additional FPGAs (XC4013E and XC3100A), large static and dynamic memory, 32 bit data and 24 bit address busses, control signals, dual clocks and four dedicated interfaces. The RIFLE-62 software environment provides easy access to hardware resources and allows their configuration via a parallel port or the PCI interface. RIFLE-62 was developed to support research in embedded DRL, reconfigurable computing, but also other DRL applications, such as self morphing and self reproduction automata.