Real Time Image Rotation Using Dynamic Reconfiguration

F ield programmable gate array (FPGA) components are widely used nowdays to implement various algorithms, such as digital filtering, in real time. The emergence of dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs made it possible to reduce the number of necessary resources to carry out an image-processing task (tasks chain). In this article, an image-processing application, image rotation, that exploits the FPGAs dynamic reconfiguration method is presented. This paper shows that the choice of an implementation, static or dynamic reconfiguration, depends on the nature of the application. A comparison is carried out between the dynamic and the static reconfiguration using two criteria: cost and performance. It appears that, according to the nature of the application, the dynamic reconfiguration can be less or more advantageous. In order to be able to test the validity of our approach in terms of algorithm and architecture adequacy, we realized an AT40K40-based board ‘‘ARDOISE’’.