A high speed open source controller for FPGA Partial Reconfiguration

Abstract

Partial Reconfiguration (PR) is an advanced technique, which improves the flexibility of FPGAs by allowing portions of a design to be reconfigured at runtime by overwriting parts of the configuration memory. PR is an important enabler for implementing adaptive systems. However, the design of such systems can be challenging, and this is especially true of the configuration controller. The generally supported methods and IP have low throughput, resulting in long configuration time that precludes PR from systems where this operation needs to be fast. In this paper, we present a high-speed configuration controller that provides several features useful in adaptive systems. The design has been released for use by the wider research community.