FPGA Architecture Enhancements to Support Heterogeneous Partially Reconfigurable Regions

Abstract

In this work the author develop an FPGA architecture which allows for the placement of a partial FPGA design on the logic fabric even if the relative placement of heterogeneous blocks within the target region is not identical to the placement used to generate the bitstream for the partial design. This work has been conducted in the context of the European FP7 FlexTiles project in which a dynamically reconfigurable logic fabric is embedded in a 3-D stacked chip along with a manycore architecture. The reconfigurable logic fabric is used to load hardware-accelerated functions whose use is scheduled at run time. All communication between the fabric and manycore is made via dedicated I/O interface blocks in the fabric. This communication configuration increases the need for a flexible architecture which can handle the placement of a single application bitstream in multiple locations on the logic fabric.