A Formal Approach to Virtualisation and Provisioning in AMBA AHB-based Reconfigurable Systems-on-Chip

In addition to vast reconfigurable arrays, present-day commercial reconfigurable SoCs also feature several embedded hard IPs such as microprocessors, DSPs, transceivers, memories etc. These IPs and the user logic implemented in the reconfigurable arrays are usually connected by popular on-chip buses such as AMBA AHB and CoreConnect. While the complexity of these cores and the sizes of the reconfigurable arrays have been growing, the on-chip bus largely remains the technology for connecting them. This paper investigates the much overlooked virtualization and provisioning implications of this trend and recommends a way of ensuring virtualization and provisioning in reconfigurable SoCs.