FPGA-enabled hardware multitasking applications in energy harvesting laboratories

This work describes the technical details of a novel methodology which enables the parallel deployment and execution of hardware applications onto the same FPGA chip using dynamic partial reconfiguration. Our approach, which makes use of the PCAP (Processor Configuration Access Port) available on the latest generation of Xilinx Zynq Systems-on-Chip, allows the processing system to operate a fast partial reconfiguration of the programmable logic with little logic overhead. The advantages brought by this technique, like scalability, high performance and dynamic management of the programmable logic are being put to use in implementing laboratory works involving running the mathematical models of energy harvesting sources. This allows the same FPGA development board to be used by several student at the same time for running their applications. Thus, this is part of a larger research effort in which we aim to develop remote online hardware design laboratories with hardware multitasking support.