A high throughput controller architecture for fast dynamic partial reconfiguration of FPGA

What is it about?

Dynamically reconfigurable architectures allow sharing of hardware resources, which is particularly beneficial for small low-end FPGAs. However, current reconfiguration controllers are limited to around 400 MB/s, causing significant delays when fetching partial bitstreams from external memory. This slow throughput penalizes performance and makes dynamic reconfiguration impractical for real-world applications, highlighting the need for faster controllers to enable practical, high-performance use cases. This work introduces a novel partial reconfiguration controller architecture that achieves a throughput of up to 1.396 GB/s, providing a 3.49× acceleration compared to current state-of-the-art controllers, significantly reducing reconfiguration time.

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Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash

Photo by Bill Fairs on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work introduces a fast DPR controller that significantly improves reconfiguration speed while using fewer hardware resources (LUTs, FFs, BRAM). By benchmarking against state-of-the-art controllers, we demonstrate its efficiency on dynamic architectures such as LeNet-5 CNN image classification and H.264 image encoding on a resource-constrained FPGA SoC (Zynq-7020). Faster reconfiguration makes DPR practical for real-time applications, improving performance and efficiency in scenarios where FPGA resources are limited.