An Emulation System of the WASMII: A Data Driven Computer on a Virtual Hardware

WASMII is a virtual hardware system which exploits dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs with a data driven control mechanism. In this paper, an emulation system of the WASMII is proposed and designed. A virtual hardware mechanism is emulated by using two FPGAs which can be on-the-fly partial reconfiguration. In the system, all configuration data which is not activated is stored in the off-chip backup RAMs and loaded into the FPGA on demand as well as virtual memory. The control units of this system are synthesized with approximately 1,500 gates from a VHDL description, and analyzed by a simulation tool. Through the analysis, it is shown that by making the best use of the hardware table and register structure tailored to each application, the system works at 10 MHz. Executing results of simple non-linear system simulation are also presented.