A Scalable Architecture to Support Networked Reconfiguration

This paper presents a proposed scalable architecture to enable networked reconfiguration for the next generation communication terminals. A new system architecture that supports networked reconfiguration is defined. It contains two new blocks the virtual reconfigurable architecture (VRA) and the application specific resource manager (ASRM). VRA can be considered as a hardware virtual machine, and it separates the terminal architecture into application independent and application specific parts. ASRM is used to automatically manage FPGA resources similar to the way a conventional OS manages memory or CPU resources. By providing both a hardware and a software virtual machine, the networked reconfiguration users only need to develop a design description targeted on the virtual platform that exploits VRA and ASRM. Keywords—FPGA; computer architecture; reconfiguration, communication terminals.