Dynamic loading of peripherals on reconfigurable System-on-Chip

This project investigates a self-reconfiguring rSoC (reconfigurable System on Chip) system which automatically and dynamically loads peripheral controllers, based on the peripherals connected to the system. The Xilinx Virtex-II FGPA, which supports dynamic partial reconfiguration, is used as the experimental target. To implement the system, three main areas are investigated: the peripheral auto detection, the dynamic partial reconfiguration mechanism on the FPGA, and the supporting software. The system core is designed as two defined areas on a single FPGA chip. A fixed area is used for the constant logic circuits (such as soft-core CPU) and partial reconfiguration (PR) slots are used for changeable peripheral controllers. The autoconfiguration process involves three different steps: peripheral auto detection, loading of a peripheral hardware interface configuration, and loading of a peripheral software driver. In our system, we successfully implement the mechanism of peripheral dynamic loading on the rSoC system. Four novel features are provided in the system: 1) Peripheral auto detection. Peripheral boards are automatically detected by the system when connected to the system. 2) Peripheral controller hardware bitstream and software driver dynamic loading. The required peripheral controller hardware bitstream for the connected peripheral board is automatically searched for and loaded by the operating system, as well as the required software driver. Manual operations on these processes are also supported. 3) Individual interface to external environment. Each PR slot provides individual interface to peripheral boards. It is configured by each peripheral controller for board-specific connection. 4) The existing system is extensible. The partial reconfiguration mechanism provided in this project supports at least two PR slots. On higher capacity FPGAs, the number of PR slots could be increased. In our existing system, the time used for the dynamic partial reconfiguration process, including the hardware bitstream loading and the software driver loading, is in the order of 10-20ms, which is an insignificant fraction of the Linux boot time