Optimization of Dynamic Hardware Reconfigurations

Abstract

Recent generations of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) allow the dynamic reconfiguration of cells on the chip during run-time. For a given problem consisting of a set of tasks with computation requirements modeled by rectangles of cells, several optimization problems such as finding the array of minimal size to accomplish the tasks within a given time limit are considered. Existing approaches based on ILP formulations to solve these problems as multi-dimensional packing problems turn out not to be applicable for problem sizes of interest. Here, a breakthrough is achieved in solving these problems to optimality by using the new notion of packing classes. It allows a significant reduction of the search space such that problems of the above type may be solved exactly using a special branch-and-bound technique. We validate the usefulness of our method by providing computational results.