Reconfigurable Architectures and Instruction Sets: Programmability, Code Generation, and Program Execution

Within Self-reconfiguring systems two basic problems arise: firstly, on instruction level reconfigurable instruction sets make program generation and execution inherently difficult. Secondly, reconfiguration must not violate certain restrictions vital for the running application. We describe a combined low-overhead approach which targets both problems by instrumenting an attributed low-overhead run-time environment which is able to dynamically map application-specific instructions to a variety of implementation alternatives while strictly adhering to given application demands. Our approach can be used application-independent and is suitable for use within the adaptive planning stage of a Self-X system as demonstrated by a reference implementation