METHOD FOR CACHEING CONFIGURATION DATA OF DATA FLOW PROCESSORS AND MODULES WITH A TWO- OR MULTIDIMENSIONAL PROGRAMMABLE CELL STRUCTURE (FPGAS, DPGAS OR SIMILAR) ACCORDING TO A HIERARCHY

摘要

Up until now, a central and global unit have been integrated into one modulewhich processes all of the configuration requests. The invention provides fora plurality of active units which can take over this task. These units arearranged in a hierarchy. A request from the lowest level is only transferredto the next highest level if the request cannot be processed. The highestlevel is connected to an internal or external higher-order configurationmemory which contains all the configuration data ever required for thisprogramme run. The tree structure of the configuration units enables a kind ofcacheing of the configuration data. The configurations are mainly accessedlocally. In the worst case scenario, a configuration has to be loaded from thehigher-order configuration memory in case the relative data are not availablein any of the CTs (configuration tables) in the hierarchy.