A Customized Reconfiguration Controller with Remote Direct ICAP Access for Dynamically Reconfigurable Platform

Abstract

As FPGA dynamic partial reconfiguration getting into mainstream, design of reconfiguration controller becomes an active research. Most of the existing reconfiguration controllers support only the loading of partial bitstream into configuration memory without allowing user to access ICAP directly, which can provide user higher controllability over the reconfigurable device. This paper presents the architecture of a customized reconfiguration controller with remote direct ICAP access. Remote direct ICAP access allows user to configure or readback device internal registers, which offer user higher controllability over the reconfigurable device. Additionally, the proposed reconfiguration controller achieved at least 3.19 Gbps of reconfiguration throughput, which reduces the platform service downtime during dynamic partial reconfiguration. In order to reduce the latency and transmission overhead of remote functional update, partial bitstream is compressed with run-length encoding before transmission.