A Flexible Reconfiguration Manager for the Erlangen Slot Machine

Abstract

We present a new concept as well as the implementation of a reconfiguration manager for a FPGA-based reconfigurable platform, the Erlangen Slot Machine (ESM). One main advantage of this platform is the possibility for each module to access its periphery independent of its location through a programmable crossbar, allowing an unrestricted run-time relocation of modules on the device. To aid the reconfiguration process we present a flexible plugin architecture for a hardware reconfiguration manager. Its advantage is fast preprocessing of bitstream data by different plugins such as a decompression and a relocation plugin. The plugin order is arbitrary and determined at run-time. Moreover, our architecture does not suffer from performance degradation if several plugins are cascaded