A Heterogeneous Multicore System on Chip with Run-Time Reconfigurable Virtual FPGA Architecture

System design, especially for low power embedded applications often profit from a heterogeneous target hardware platform. The application can be partitioned into modules with specific requirements e.g. parallelism or performance in relation to the provided hardware blocks on the multicore hardware. The result is an optimized application mapping and a parallel processing with lower power consumption on the different cores on the hardware. This paper presents a heterogeneous platform consisting of a microprocessor and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) connected via a standard AMBA bus. The novelty of this approach is that the FPGA is realized as virtual reconfigurable hardware upon a traditional off the shelf FPGA device. The advantage with this approach is that the specification of the virtual FPGA stays unchanged, independent to the underlying hardware and provides therefore features, which the exploited physical host FPGA cannot provide. A special feature of the presented virtual FPGA amongst others is the dynamic reconfigurability which is for example not available with all off the shelf FPGAs. Furthermore the concept of FPGA virtualization enables the re-use of hardware blocks on other physical FPGA devices. This paper presents the hardware platform and describes the tool chain for the heterogeneous system on chip.