Reducing Reconfiguration Overheads Using Configuration Prefetch, Optimal Reuse, and Optimal Memory Mapping

Abstract

Modern embedded systems are packed with dedicated field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate the overall system performance. But the main drawback in using FPGA as a reconfigurable system is that a lot of reconfiguration overheads are generated in the reconfiguration process. The reconfiguration overheads are mainly because of the configuration data being fetched from the off-chip memory and also due to the improper management of tasks during execution. This work focusses mainly on the prefetch heuristics, reuse technique, and the available memory hierarchy to provide an efficient management of tasks over the available resources. This short communication proposes a new optimal replacement policy which reduces the overall time and energy reconfiguration overheads for static systems in their subsequent iterations. It is evident from the results that most of the time and energy reconfiguration overheads are eliminated.