Automated Partial Reconfiguration Design for Adaptive Systems with CoPR for Zynq

Abstract

Dynamically adaptive systems (DAS) respond to environmental conditions, by modifying their processing at runtime and selecting alternative configurations of computation. Field programmable gate arrays, with their support for partial reconfiguration (PR) represent an ideal platform for implementing such systems. Designing partially reconfigurable systems has traditionally been a difficult task requiring FPGA expertise. This paper presents a fully automated framework for implementing PR based adaptive systems. The designer specifies a set of valid configurations containing instances of modules from a standard library. The tool automates partitioning of modules into regions, floorplanning regions on the FPGA fabric, and generation of bitstreams. A runtime system manages the loading of bitstreams automatically through API calls.