Configuration relocation and defragmentation for reconfigurable computing

Custom computing systems exhibit significant speedups over traditional microprocessors by mapping compute-intensive sections of a program to reconfigurable logic (Hauck, 1998). However, the high overhead of reconfiguration can limit the execution times achievable with these systems. Research has shown that the ability to relocate and defragment configurations on an FPGA dramatically decreases the overall configuration overhead (Li et al., 2000). We therefore explore the adaptation of the Xilinx 6200 series FPGA for relocation and defragmentation. Due to some of the complexities involved with this structure, we also present a novel architecture designed from the ground up to provide relocation and defragmentation support with a negligible area increase over a generic partially reconfigurable FPGA.