An Efficient Placement Algorithm for Run-time Reconfigurable Embedded System

In the era of application convergence, the small handheld battery-powered portable devices are required to multiplex their limited hardware resources between many complex applications. Our first contribution in this paper is a modular and block based configuration architecture for modern FPGAs like Xilinx’s Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 devices, to increase multi-tasking capabilities, power savings and performance improvement of applications for mobile handsets. Our second contribution is an on-line placement algorithm based on bin packing, called Hierarchical Best Fit Ascending (HBFA) algorithm, which is more efficient than Best Fit (BF) algorithm for mapping a dynamic task list onto the FPGA. The overall time complexity of the proposed on-line placement algorithm, HBFA, is reduced to O(n) in comparison to the complexity of BF algorithm which is O(n 2 ). The placement solution provided by HBFA algorithm is also better than that of BF algorithm.