Architecture-Aware Reconfiguration-Centric Floorplanning for Partial Reconfiguration

摘要

Partial reconfiguration (PR) has enabled the adoption of FP-GAs in state of the art adaptive applications. Current PR tools require the designer to perform manual floorplanning, which requires knowledge of the physical architecture of FPGAs and an understanding of how to floorplan for optimal performance and area. This has lead to PR remaining a specialist skill and made it less attractive to high level system designers. In this paper we introduce a technique which can be incorporated into the existing tool flow that overcomes the need for manual floorplanning for PR designs. It takes into account overheads generated due to PR as well as the architecture of the latest FPGAs. This results in a floorplan that is efficient for PR systems, where reconfiguration time and area should be minimised.