A Self-Reconfigurable Platform for General Purpose Image Processing Systems on Low-Cost Spartan-6

Abstract—There is still no partial reconfiguration tool support on low-cost Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) such as old-fashioned Spartan-3 and state-of-the-art Spartan-6 FPGA families by Xilinx. This forces the designers and engineers, who are using the partial reconfiguration capability of FPGAs, to use expensive families such as Virtex-4, Virtex-5 and Virtex-6 which are officially supported by partial reconfiguration (PR) software. Moreover, Xilinx still does not offer a portable, dedicated self-reconfiguration engine for all of the FPGAs. Self-reconfiguration is achieved with general-purpose processors such as MicroBlaze and PowerPC which are too overqualified for this purpose. In this study, we propose a new self-reconfiguration mechanism for Spartan-6 FPGAs. This mechanism can be used to implement large and complex designs on small FPGAs as chip area can be dramatically reduced by exploiting the dynamic partia