New tool support and architectures in adaptive reconfigurable computing

Novel methods and reconfigurable architectures provide an increased design space by exploiting the dynamic and partial reconfiguration of hardware. The multi-adaptivity of this heterogeneous reconfigurable architectures reaches from adaptation to performance requirements over adaptation to power consumption in relation to an available amount of energy to adaptation to not predictable requirements from the user. Especially the unpredictable demands and requirements to a computing architecture require a high and filigree adaptivity in order to find an optimized point of operation while run- time. Additional to this issue the increased availability of electronic systems comes by introduction of novel methods for failure redundancy which can be seen as an application of this multi-adaptive system. In this contribution the ideas for a novel system approach will be presented in three parts. First the hardware and methods providing the multi-adaptivity will be presented. This is the basis for higher level design tools and opens a variety of parameters for adaptivity. The mechanisms of reconfigurability will be introduced in detail from basic knowledge to advanced mechanisms and methods. In addition the abstraction levels for manipulation the reconfigurable architecture and points to the tool support for novel reconfigurable FPGA architectures from Xilinx are sketched.