A Networked, Lightweight and Partially Reconfigurable Platform

International audienceIn this paper we present a networked lightweight and par- tially reconfigurable platform assisted by a remote bitstreams server. We propose a software and hardware architecture as well as a new data-link level network protocol implementation dedicated to dynamic and par- tial reconfiguration of FPGAs. It requires a network controller and much less external memories to store reconfiguration software, bitstreams and buffer pools used by standard communication protocols. Our measures, based on a real implementation, show that our system can download re- mote bistreams with a reconfiguration speed ten times faster than known solutions