A run-time support environment for reconfigurable systems

This paper presents a novel FPGA Support System (FSS) that facilitates the execution of hardware-based tasks on a dynamically reconfigurable FPGA. The FSS provides the mechanisms to support the placement, execution and removal of blocks on the FPGA. A key feature of the FSS is its ability to provide communication between concurrently executing hardware blocks and software objects during the run-time of a system. The FSS was initially developed to run on a hardware platform consisting of an ARM7 processor interfaced to a Xilinx 6264 FPGA and a dual-port memory. The design, implementation and current status of the FSS are discussed, together with our initial results based on the implementation of a discrete wavelet transform application.