Design methodology for partial dynamic reconfiguration: a new degree of freedom in the HW/SW codesign

Many emerging products in communication, computing and consumer electronics demand that their functionality remains flexible also after the system has been manufactured and that is why the reconfiguration is starting to be considered into the design flow as a new relevant degree of freedom, in which the designer can have the system autonomously modify its functionalities according to the application's changing needs. Therefore, reconfigurable devices, such as FPGAs, introduce yet another degree of freedom in the design workflow: the designer can have the system autonomously modify the functionality carried out by the IP core according to the application's changing needs while it runs. Research in this field is, indeed, being driven towards a more thorough exploitation of the reconfiguration capabilities of such devices, so as to take advantage of them not only at compile-time, i.e. at the time when the system is first deployed, but also at run-time, which allows the reconfigurable device to be reprogrammed without the rest of the system having to stop running. This paper presents emerging methodologies to design reconfigurable applications, providing, as an example the workflow defined at the Politecnico di Milano.