A universal low cost run-time and programming environment for reconfigurable computing

Summarization: This paper presents a run-time environment for reconfigurable computing. The environment is based on a formal language to represent primitive operations. A well-defined formal interface between the run-time environment, which is hosted on a personal computer, and a download apparatus allows for the description of download, upload, and test operations on the target device in a vendor-independent way. The environment and download apparatus have been successfully used with several designs and FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) of multiple vendors. The download apparatus is based on a low-cost microcontroller, keeping the hardware system cost to less than one-tenth of FPGA vendor download cables.Presented on