Reconfigurable Computing pdf resource

[guesswho]

Reconfigurable Computing

An excelllent paper on the develpoment of ASIC and FPGAs.

:lol:

 

[calvinhorng]

Thank you for the great resource

 

[calvinhorng]

I am wondering how to boot the reconfigurable processor.
there shall be a configuration ROM for FPGA and then once the FPGA is configured, then the processor will start to boot.

But if the configuration memory needed to be updated, isn't the configuration ROM shall be updated? In such reasoning, the configuration ROM shall be EEPROM or FLASH. But how can the EEPROM and FLASH be updated?

Anyone has any experience?

Thank you

 

[Ohh]

About configuring FPGA logic...

For example, you can boot the embedded processor using the (external) boot ROM, then you can download the rest from other storage elements (EEPROM, Flash, etc.) or from PC or over Internet.
Note that the processor is used to manage the FPGA in this case.

 

[Ohh]

Another possible scenario is when implementing an embedded processor in an FPGA device -- a soft processor, you have to configure the FPGA device to behave like a processor system using the default configuration bitstream and after that you can boot up the processor system. However, reconfiguration during run-time is not possible without external help, for example you may have a controller which is responsible to reconfigure the FPGA device. In this case the process will put itself in a safe state (e.g. saving its data in an external RAM, etc.). It then notifies the configuration controler to reconfigure the FPGA device with a new configuration. After reconfiguration, a new processor becomes active.
Since some FPGAs support partial reconfiguration, it maybe possible to reconfigure only some parts in the FPGA. For example, a function unit in the datapath of the processor can be replaced with another function unit after reconfiguration.

 

[pcb100]

Refer to: Reconfigurable Computing: Architecture, Models and Algorithms, by Kiran Bondalapati and Viktor K. Prasanna