A novel SoC design methodology combining adaptive software and reconfigurable hardware

Reconfigurable hardware is becoming a prominent component in a large variety of SoC designs. Reconfigurability allows for efficient hardware acceleration and virtually unlimited adaptability. On the other hand, overheads associated with reconfiguration and interfaces with the software component need to be evaluated carefully during the exploration phase. The aim of this paper is to identify the best trade-off considering application-specific features in software, which can lend itself to software-based acceleration and lead to a revision of the view that certain computationally intensive tasks can only be accelerated through hardware. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques, we built an extensive development and experimental setup, bringing together the MLTon-based programming environment and physical mapping of the software and hardware onto a real dynamically reconfigurable SoC system.