A Framework to Improve IP Portability on Reconfigurable Computers

- This paper presents a framework that improves the portability and ease-of-use issues of current Reconfigurable Computers (RCs). These two drawbacks should be solved in order for RC to become a mainstream solution. Portability across platforms is difficult to achieve because RC systems have diverse hardware architectures and services. This lack of portability hinders reuse, and thus, easeof-use. The framework proposed in this work is able to hide the architectural details of the systems, simplify the IP integration, and provide the portability across different RC platforms. User specifies IP requirements such as memory configuration, sequential or random access to the memory, or I/O registers using a graphical-user-interface (GUI) tool, which generates a hardware interface specification for the IP and the logic necessary to target the selected platform. The hardware interface remains the same regardless the targeted architecture. In addition, the tool generates a software library that...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ERSA
• Authors: Miaoqing Huang, Ivan Gonzalez, Sergio López-Buedo, Tarek A. El-Ghazawi
• Keywords: Current Reconfigurable Computers, ERSA 2008, Hardware, Hardware Interface, Portability Hinders