Runtime Environment for Dynamically Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

A runtime environment has been developed to enable the seamless integration of different hardware and software implementation technologies (DSP’s, FPGA’s, ASIC’s). The runtime environment is responsible for the management of dynamic system reconfiguration, including software reconfiguration for the parallel DSP’s and hardware reconfiguration for the FPGA’s in the system. This paper describes the runtime environment developed as part of a modelintegrated design environment for dynamically reconfigurable systems. This runtime environment provides a common execution semantics across software and hardware and also provides the ability to dynamically reconfigure the processing structure implemented on both hardware and software.