Minimizing the runtime partial reconfiguration overheads in reconfigurable systems

Configuration overhead is a major performance bottleneck of the partial reconfiguration process. In this paper, we propose a combination of two techniques to minimize the partial reconfiguration performance overhead. First, we design and implement fully streaming DMA engines to achieve a near perfect configuration throughput. Second, we exploit the configuration data redundancy through Run-Length Encoding to compress the configuration bitstreams, and we implement an intelligent ICAP (Internal Configuration Access Port) controller to perform decompression at runtime. The results show that our design achieve an effective configuration data transfer throughput that well surpasses the upper bound of data transfer throughput, 400 Mbytes/s. Specifically, our fully stream DMA engines reduce the configuration time from the range of seconds to the range of milliseconds, a more than 1000-fold improvement. In addition, our simple compression scheme achieves significant reduction of bitstream size and results in a decompression circuit with negligible hardware overhead.