Efficiently Generating FPGA Configurations through a Stack Machine

  • Authors:
  • Fatma Abouelella;Karel Bruneel;Dirk Stroobandt

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • FPL '10 Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Parameterizable configurations are regular FPGA configurations in which some of the configuration bits are expressed as Boolean functions of a set of parameters. These configurations can be rapidly transformed to a specialized configuration by evaluating the Boolean functions for a specific set of parameter values and are therefore ideal for use in run-time reconfigurable systems. To accommodate the use of parameterizable configurations in commercial FPGAs, the concept of the Parameterizable Bitstream was introduced. In this paper, we introduce a hardware implementation that evaluates the Parameterizable Bitstream based on a stack machine architecture. We enabled fast generation of specialized configurations with a significant reduction in resources (80%) in comparison to the MicroBlaze soft processor when it is used as a configuration generation engine.