Generic Software Framework for Adaptive Applications on FPGAs

Adaptive systems are set to become more mainstream, as numerous practical applications in the communications domain emerge. FPGAs offer an ideal implementation platform, combining high performance with flexibility. While significant research has been undertaken in the area of FPGA partial reconfiguration, it has focussed primarily on low-level architecture-specific implementations. Building upon this previous work, we present a system model and software architecture for implementing runtime adaptive applications on FPGAs, separating the control and processing planes and abstracting away the details of hardware reconfiguration from the system designer. Hardware processing components appear as software components in the runtime system, enabling their inclusion in adaptive applications. We present an adaptive wireless application, demonstrating the use of the model and software architecture.