A Customized Reconfiguration Controller with Remote Direct ICAP Access for Dynamically Reconfigurable Platform
Abstract: As FPGA dynamic
partial reconfiguration getting into mainstream, design of reconfiguration controller
becomes an active research. Most of the existing reconfiguration controllers
support only the loading of partial bitstream into configuration memory without
allowing user to access ICAP directly, which can provide user higher
controllability over the reconfigurable device. This paper presents the
architecture of a customized reconfiguration controller with remote direct ICAP
access. Remote direct ICAP access allows user to configure or readback device
internal registers, which offer user higher controllability over the
reconfigurable device. Additionally, the proposed reconfiguration controller
achieved at least 3.19 Gbps of reconfiguration throughput, which reduces the
platform service downtime during dynamic partial reconfiguration. In order to reduce
the latency and transmission overhead of remote functional update, partial
bitstream is compressed with run-length encoding before transmission.
Author: Tze Hon Tan
Journal Code: jptkomputergg170185
