A scalable reconfiguration mechanism for fast dynamic reconfiguration

Abstract

Hardware reconfiguration during run-time provides attractive features like fast adaptivity, high hardware utilisation, and low area consumption due to efficient reuse of hardware components. In this paper, a novel multi-layered reconfiguration mechanism is proposed that allows frequent dynamic reconfiguration at very low latencies. It combines successful existing techniques such as multi-context and partial reconfiguration with new ideas like tag-matching and reconfiguration profiles to one uniform approach. As an important feature, the proposed reconfiguration mechanism is well scalable and can be adapted to given hardware structures easily, thus being applicable to virtually any reconfigurable fabric. In contrast to many existing techniques, it also supports even very heterogeneous architectures found for instance in custom reconfigurable systems. By experimental results, we show that our reconfiguration mechanism provides significantly lower reconfiguration latencies compared to some common existing techniques.