Infrastructure for dynamic reconfigurable systems

Abstract

Platform-based design is a method to implement complex SoCs, avoiding chip design from scratch. A promising evolution of platform-based design are MPSoC. Such generic architectures might furnish enough performance for several classes of embedded systems. An associated advantage of these architectures is flexibility at the software level. In principle, hardware is not flexible. Thus, dedicated IP blocks must be inserted before chip design, or enough area can be reserved for them when using reconfigurable blocks. Dynamic self-reconfigurable systems (DSRSs) introduce flexibility to hardware. In DSRSs, IP blocks are loaded according to application demand, reducing area, power consumption and system cost. An MPSoC based platform, associated with dynamic reconfiguration, provides both hardware and software flexibility. This paper has two main goals. First, to present the necessary infrastructure for DSRSs, identifying which components are required in these systems, such as a configuration controller, configuration ports and reconfigurable IP interfaces. The second objective is to discuss practical implementations choices and area-performance tradeoffs. The paper employs case studies to access the advantages and problems related to different implementations for the communication infrastructure (bus and NoC), the configuration controller (hardware and software) and IP interfaces (LUT and tristate based).