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Journal of Information Science and Engineering, Vol. 26 No. 4, pp. 1289-1305


Hardware Context-Switch Methodology for Dynamically Partially Reconfigurable Systems


TRONG-YEN LEE, CHE-CHENG HU, LI-WEN LAI AND CHIA-CHUN TSAI+
Department of Electronic Engineering and Institute of Computer and Communication Engineering 
National Taipei University of Technology 
Taipei, 106 Taiwan 
E-mail: tylee@ntut.edu.tw 
+Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering 
Nanhua University 
Chiayi, 622 Taiwan 
E-mail: chun@mail.mhu.edu.tw


     Nowadays, the hardware of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be reconfigured both dynamically and partially. A dynamically and partially reconfigurable system can share hardware contexts among various hardware tasks. However, such FPGA systems require much memory to save the hardware context. To solve this problem, this work proposes a methodology for switching hardware context in dynamically partially reconfigurable FPGA systems. This method can reduce the reconfiguration time and memory size of hardware context-switching by analyzing the characteristic of bit indexes and frame addresses. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces 10.674% in hardware reconfiguration time, 47.47% in memory size, and 41.25% in resource overhead.


Keywords: context-switching, dynamically partially reconfigurable system, Readback, reconfiguration time, memory size, resource overhead

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