A New Three-Level Strategy for Off-Line Placement of Hardware Tasks on Partially and Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware

The partially reconfigurable hardware devices are commonly used in real-time systems; these devices feature a high density of heterogeneous resources to enable multitasking and supply a reasonable flexibility with regard to application requirements. As a result, efficient management of hardware tasks and hardware resources is absolutely essential. Scheduling and placement methods suffer, however, from the issues of resource waste, task rejection and configuration overheads. This paper focuses on a new three-level placement strategy of hardware tasks on these prominent devices and aims at optimized use of the resources to target all the mentioned issues. Two complete methods are proposed in this chapter to efficiently solve the issue of reconfigurable area management. Experiments demonstrate improvement of up to 36% in resource utilization over the available reconfigurable resources, 43% in resource gain as compared to static implementation, and an overall configuration overhead of 11% from the total application running time.

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