Mixed hardware/software applications on dynamically reconfigurable hardware

Mixed hardware/software applications may profit from the use of dynamically reconfigurable hardware for improved performance and adaptability. For this class of systems, the hardware, like the software, can be adapted during execution to the data being processed or to the reactions of the external system being controlled. This paper presents the prototype of an interactive system that supports the rapid development of such applications for a personal computer. The LISP-based prototype supports the assembly of hardware configurations in runtime by combination of component blocks from libraries; it also provides tools for partitioning computations described by a domain-independent data-flow model between software and hardware implementations. Whatever the implementation mode, computations are invoked in a uniform manner, making the dynamically reconfigurable hardware transparent to the user.