XHWIF: A portable hardware interface for reconfigurable computing

As the interest in FPGA-based hardware has grown, so has the number and type of commercially available platforms. The greatest drawback to this proliferation of hardware platforms is the lack of standards. Even boards using identical hosts, FPGA devices and bus interfaces typically have widely varying software interfaces, limiting the portability of tools and applications across these platforms. Xilinx's XHWIF(tm) portable hardware interface attempts to address this problem. The XHWIF interface provides a software layer providing all necessary communication and control for generic FPGA-based hardware. This interface permits tools and applications to be run on a variety of platforms, typically without modifications or re-compilation. In addition, a remote network interface is supplied as part of XHWIF API. Applications and tools which use the XHWIF interface can also run transparently across a network without modification. This permits not only sharing of hardware resources in a networked environment, but a simple way of implementing systems which use Remote Network Reconfiguration. XHWIF API is currently provided as part of Xilinx's JBits(tm) Software Development Kit.