A networked, lightweight and partially reconfigurable platform

Abstract

In this paper we present a networked lightweight and partially reconfigurable platform assisted by a remote bitstreams server. We propose a software and hardware architecture as well as a new data-link level network protocol implementation dedicated to dynamic and partial reconfiguration of FPGAs. It requires a network controller and much less external memories to store reconfiguration software, bitstreams and buffer pools used by standard communication protocols. Our measures, based on a real implementation, show that our system can download remote bistreams with a reconfiguration speed ten times faster than known solutions. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.