A Framework for the Design of Distributed Reconfigurable Embedded Systems

Inhalt:
Recent trends in embedded systems architectures are increasingly based on FPGA technologies extending traditional ASIC cores and providing reconfigurable hardware support for performance demanding applications such as multimedia and network or security processing. In this paper, we propose a new framework for the design and management of hardware reconfigurability in distributed embedded environments. The essential aim of the framework is to abstract away the details of the underlying FPGA technology and expose a register transfer level view of the hardware-accelerated blocks, allowing the software layer to extract, manipulate, and even export the hardware/software execution state at run-time. The paper also presents some case-study scenarios emphasizing the benefits enabled by the proposed framework for the design of distributed embedded systems.