Flexible Hardware Support for Interworking Systems

Todays FPGA technology allows reconngurable hardware to be integrated into standard PC hardware. With this kind of hardware it is possible to change hardware functionality on-they and to remove and insert complete subsystems just by rebooting the conngurable parts. Hardware like this has new demands on software that often can't be fulllled by the classical device driver concept used in todays operating systems. This paper presents a exible and on-they reconngurable hardware subsystem for interwork-ing systems together with software integration that allows fast and eecient reconnguration of the hardware. It provides a exible integration into a Unix environment.