FPGA reconfiguration using UART and SPI flash

An important property of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) which makes it ideally suitable for any commercial application is its reconfigurable technology. Unlike ASICs, an FPGA can be reconfigured several times. This paper discusses a new approach of FPGA reconfiguration which makes use of an external flash memory associated with an FPGA. This technique eliminates the use of JTAG port for reconfiguration. Also, it reduces the time required for reconfiguration significantly. The Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART) and Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) communication protocols are used for its implementation. While reconfiguring the FPGA anytime in future only a simple serial communication application is needed, as the configuration file transfer happens over UART lines only. Hence the use of Xilinx tools like iMPACT can also be eliminated with this approach. The proposed work is completely implemented with Xilinx 14.7 Design tools.