PRML: A Modeling Language for Rapid Design Exploration of Partially Reconfigurable FPGAs

Leveraging partial reconfiguration (PR) can improve system flexibility, cost, and performance/power/area tradeoffs over non-PR functionally-equivalent systems, however, realizing these benefits is challenging, time-consuming, and PR must be considered early during application design to reduce design exploration time and improve system quality. To facilitate realizing these benefits, we present an application design framework and an abstract modeling language for PR (PRML). By applying extensive PRML modeling guidelines to a complex arithmetic core, we show PRML's potential for efficient PR capability analysis, enabling designers to determine Pareto optimal systems during application formulation based on designer-specified area and performance metrics.

[1]  Wolfgang Nebel,et al.  OSSS+R: A framework for application level modelling and synthesis of reconfigurable systems , 2009, 2009 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition.

[2]  Norbert Abel.  Design and Implementation of an Object-Oriented Framework for Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.

[3]  Ann Gordon-Ross,et al.  Formulation-level design space exploration for partially reconfigurable FPGAs , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology.

[4]  Akhilesh Tyagi,et al.  Partial reconfiguration logic synthesis by temporal slicing , 2011, 2011 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology.

[5]  A. Antola,et al.  A Novel Hardware/Software Codesign Methodology Based on Dynamic Reconfiguration with Impulse C and Codeveloper , 2007, 2007 3rd Southern Conference on Programmable Logic.

[6]  Rehan Ahmed,et al.  Modeling and Evaluation of Dynamic Partial Reconfigurable Datapaths for FPGA-Based Systems Using Stochastic Networks , 2011, 2011 21st International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.