Virtual Partial Reconfiguration Framework for the Digilent Nexys 3 Board

The modern embedded system is getting more complicated due to the functional requirements of the system are rapidly increasing. The modern system must have more reliable, as it deals with a lot of data. The distributed systems are used in variety technologies field due to it has more reliable than single control unit. It can transfer task to other processing unit when the one part of system failed while the single control unit failed cause the system to stop operate. The FPGA are being used increasingly in the distributed system due to the benefit of FPGA over microcontroller and ASIC. FPGA is flexible than ASIC due to the ability to reconfiguration its function. FPGA processes the data in parallel, therefore, it computes the data faster than the microcontroller that computes the data in concurrence. The flexibility of FPGA supports the development of reliable distributed system. When one of FPGA failed, the other FPGA can reconfiguration itself to operate on the task of the failed FPGA. The method to reconfigure the FPGA structure is a process of loading new bitstream file into FPGA. For generating variety configurations of distributed system. The developer must develop number of bitstream file according to number of reconfiguration designs. Although the FPGA is flexible and can reconfiguration anytime, the development process of configuration file is a redundancy workload. One FPGA design structure equals one configuration file. This project focus on reduce the redundancy workload, therefore, it can reduce the development time and make the development project launching faster. This virtual partial reconfiguration framework is developed to assist the developer in generating many configuration files without coding. The framework will determine all possible combination of modules and generates all combination design files. One set of the design contain the VHDL file and UCF file. The developer can use these files to synthesise in FPGA vendor development tool and generate bitstream. This virtual partial reconfiguration framework also provides the partial reconfiguration benefits except runtime reconfiguration