Composable and Persistent-State Application Swapping on FPGAs Using Hardwired Network on Chip

Abstract

We envision that future FPGA will use a hardwired network on chip (HWNoC)~\cite{Goossens08NoCS} as a unified interconnect for functional communications (data and control) as well as configuration (bitstream for soft IPs). In this paper we present a reconfiguration methodology which makes use of such a platform to realize composable inter-application communication and persistent-state intra-application when run-time partial reconfiguration is performed. The proposed methodology also ensures that the required performance constraints of the dynamically swapped in application are fulfilled. We describe the approach and steps required to achieve the above objectives. We model the application dynamic swapping behavior in cycle-accurate transaction-level SystemC which includes bitstream loading, HWNoC programming, clocking, reset, computation.