Semi-distributed Control for FPGA-based Reconfigurable Systems

Due to the growing complexity of the applications targeted by FPGA-based reconfigurable systems, the control design of such systems is becoming one of the main hurdles faced by designers. In this paper, we propose a semi-distributed control model based on the separation between different control concerns (monitoring, decision-making and reconfiguration) and on formalism-oriented design in order to decrease the design complexity of the control, and facilitate design verification, reuse and scalability. This model is composed of distributed controllers handling each the self-adaptivity of a reconfigurable region of the system, and a coordinator that coordinates their reconfiguration decisions in order to respect global system constraints. Implementations on FPGA showed that our semi-distributed control model is more flexible, reusable and scalable than the centralized one, at the cost of a slight increase in required hardware resources.

[1]  Laurent Pautet,et al.  Mode-based reconfiguration of critical software component architectures , 2009, 2009 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition.

[2]  Ali Akoglu,et al.  FPGA based distributed self healing architecture for reusable systems , 2009, Cluster Computing.

[3]  Lars Braun,et al.  A FPGA based fast runtime reconfigurable real-time Multi-Object-Tracker , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

[4]  Roland Kasper,et al.  An Adaptive FPGA-Based Mechatronic Control System Supporting Partial Reconfiguration of Controller Functionalities , 2006, First NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS'06).

[5]  Florence Maraninchi,et al.  Mode-Automata: a new domain-specific construct for the development of safe critical systems , 2003, Sci. Comput. Program..

[6]  Jeff Mason,et al.  Invited Paper: Enhanced Architectures, Design Methodologies and CAD Tools for Dynamic Reconfiguration of Xilinx FPGAs , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.

[7]  Jooheung Lee,et al.  Scalable FPGA-based architecture for DCT computation using dynamic partial reconfiguration , 2009, TECS.

[8]  Éric Rutten,et al.  Contracts for modular discrete controller synthesis , 2010, LCTES '10.

[9]  Jean-Marc Philippe,et al.  A Self-reconfigurable FPGA-Based Platform for Prototyping Future Pervasive Systems , 2010, ICES.

[10]  Jürgen Becker,et al.  An Interface for a Decentralized 2D Reconfiguration on Xilinx Virtex-FPGAs for Organic Computing , 2009, Int. J. Reconfigurable Comput..

[11]  Éric Rutten,et al.  Modeling and Formal Control of Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration , 2010, 2010 International Conference on Reconfigurable Computing and FPGAs.

[12]  Wayne Luk,et al.  Reconfiguring Distributed Applications in FPGA Accelerated Cluster with Wireless Networking , 2011, 2011 21st International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.