Reconfiguration Strategy for FPGA Dependability Characteristics Improvement based on Stochastic Petri Net

This paper shows the impact of the trade-off between reconfigurable and non-reconfigurable parts of the FPGA to the dependability characteristics of the whole design. Stochastic Petri nets have been used to compute reliability and dependability characteristics in a simple FPGA design with dynamically reconfigurable modules. Some parts of the design are not possible or proper to reconfigure dynamically (e.g. module interconnections, module-pin connections ...). A non-reconfigurable overhead may have a significant effect to the availability of the design. The granularity of reconfigurable parts and their number can also affect dependability parameters. The method how to enumerate these effects via a formal dependability model is shown in this paper.