IP-Based Resource Management in Reconfigurable Systems

Nowadays, the design of reconfigurable systems has become a popular topic of re-search. With the capability of dynamic partial reconfiguration, the behavior of a hardware task is becoming more and more similar to that of a software task. Hence, if reconfigurable systems consist of two hardware tasks using the same IPs, then there may be not only a waste in the reconfigurable resource logic area and high power consumption, but also incur an additional configuration time. Extracting shared IPs not only reduces the design com-plexity, but also increases the reusability of shared IPs. In this Thesis, we propose a unified interface for communication and resource management strategy to support the reusable and portable IPs. A framework similar to the concept of Component Object Model (COM) is proposed for IP design. Through a predefined interface and a resource manager, a uni-fied communication interface is proposed to support the reuse of IPs, and a strategy for resource allocation is also proposed to support a slot-based architecture in FPGAs. In our experiments, we compare the proposed architecture to a traditional non-reconfigurable one. From our experiment results, the performance is enhanced due to a decrease of 11.55 % an