Reconfiguration of FPGA for Domain Specific Applications using Embedded System Approach

Today's systems are more complex and need higher performance. To accomplish this, systems include more hardware compared to software. This increases the use of FPGAs in modern systems because of its reconfiguration capabilities. FPGA contains many hardware components, which are utilized to perform operations directly in hardware. There are two problems related to this issue, first is high performance hardware for multiple applications need to be designed, many times these hardwares take more than one FPGA which in turn increases the system cost, even only one hardware is in use at any time. Second problem arises when operations from different domains need to be performed. There are domain specialized hardware available which deal domain specific operations efficiently, FPGAs are used in these cases also, but generally domains need to be changed after hundreds of instructions so configuring hardware for both domains simultaneously is waste of hardware resources. We have proposed a design approach that can reconfigure FPGA at its maximum speed for solving these two problems. Our proposed system can choose the appropriate architecture for domain specific application by burning corresponding configuration in the FPGA from EEPROM.