1Novel Design Methods and a Tool Flow for Unleashing Dynamic Reconfiguration

Abstract — During the last few years, there is an increasing interest in mixing software and hardware to serve efficiently different applications. This is due to the heterogeneity character-izing the tasks of an application which require the presence of resources from both worlds, software and hardware. Controlling effectively these resources through an integrated tool flow is a challenging problem and towards this direction only a few efforts exist. In fact, a framework that seamlessly exploits both resources of a platform for executing efficiently an application has not yet come into existence. Moreover, reconfigurable computing often incorporated in such platforms due to its high flexibility and customization, has not yet taken off due to the lack of exploit-ing its full capabilities. Thus, the capability of reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to be dynamically reconfigured, i.e. reprogramming part of the chi