An Investigation of Mobile Device Supporting Online Self-dynamic Partial Reconfiguration on a Testbed System

A mobile device has become widely used not only for telephone and email, but also for entertainment. Some entertainments such as 4K require heavy process for video and high-quality games. Therefore, a mobile device needs higher performance and lower power consumption. To achieve them, hardware implementation instead of processing heavy software is effective. However, it is impossible to prepare a wide variety of hardware on a mobile device. Therefore, we considered installing a reconfigurable device on a mobile device to support the Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR). The mobile device we have proposed is equipped with a reconfigurable device such as an FPGA inside the System on Chip. The website like Apple Store distributes the DPR application. The DPR application consists of software and hardware data. When executing the application, the software runs first. Then, the mobile device uses the hardware data corresponding to the software and configures reconfigurable hardware on FPGA. Since hardware can perform parallel processing, it is expected to achieve higher performance and lower power consumption than software. In this paper, we aimed to in investigate the feasibility of the mobile device supporting DPR. So, we create this mobile device with the FPGA and support online the DPR by using Lightwight IP (LwIP). LwIP is lightweight TCP / IP stack for embedded devices. Then, the correct operation of the created the mobile device was confirmed. Furthermore, the time required for the DPR was sufficiently short, confirming the feasibility of a mobile device with the FPGA.