Controlling Configurations on Dynamic Reconfigurable Systems

Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems (DRSs) have the potential to provide hardware with flexibility similar to that of software. At the same time, they may lead to better performance and smaller system size. However, there is a clear lack of support devices, tools and design flows adequate for such systems. One of the main problems for enabling dynamically reconfigurable systems is the unavailability of efficient methods to control the hardware configuration process. The main contribution of this work is the proposal of a configuration controller totally built in hardware. This is different from previous approaches, where software implementations dominate. The proposed controller has been implemented and validated in Virtex-II Xilinx FPGAs.