A Design Methodology for Dynamic Reconfiguration: The Caronte Architecture

The most common reconfigurable devices today are Field Program-mable Gate Arrays, FPGAs. Aim of this paper is to propose a de-sign methodology for dynamically reconfigurable systems provid-ing a dynamic architecture that, thanks to the processor embedded in the FPGA, is able to dynamically change the design implemen-tation to meet and satisfy all the requirements of the system im-plementation. The proposed methodology provides a solution for the partial dynamic reconfiguration of an embedded system, us-ing a common FPGA and development board, without any specific or dedicated device. This paper describes the Caronte architec-ture used to implement the proposed approach, showing how it is possible to obtain a reconfigurable system just using tools that are already widely used to design FPGA-based systems. 1