Minimization of the reconfiguration latency for the mapping of applications on FPGA-based systems

Abstract

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become promising mapping fabric for the implementation of System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms, due to their large capacity and their enhanced support for dynamic and partial reconfigurability. Design automation support for partial reconfigurability includes several key challenges. In particular, reconfiguration algorithms need to be developed to effectively exploit the available area and run-time reconfiguration support for instantiating at run-time the hardware components needed to execute multiple applications concurrently. These new algorithms must be able to achieve maximum application execution performance at a minimum reconfiguration overhead. In this work, we propose a novel design flow that minimizes the amount of core reconfigurations needed to map multiple applications dynamically (i.e., using run-time reconfiguration) on FPGAs. This new mapping flow features a multi-stage design optimization algorithm that makes it possible to reduce the reconfiguration latency up to 43%, by taking into account the reconfiguration costs and SoC block reuse between the different applications that need to be executed dynamically on the FPGA. Moreover, we show that the proposed multi-stage optimization algorithm explores a large set of mapping trade-offs, by taking into account the traffic flows for each application, the run-time reconfiguration costs and the number of reconfigurable regions available on the FPGA.