Remote embedded simulation system for SW/HW co-design based on dynamic partial reconfiguration

Abstract

Projects involving both software design and hardware design are usually retarded by expensive equipments, complex simulation and challenging modification. In order to retrench the designers' time and economic costs in SW/HW (Software/Hardware) co-design simulation, this paper demonstrates a remote embedded simulation system to help multiple users manage and simulate their SW/HW co-design projects remotely while scheduling the access to on-chip FPGA resources. We built a small-scale, high-concurrent multiuser management service system on board. The system offers TCP/IP connection and transmission, flexible Wi-Fi network, secure multiuser information and files management, real-time task progress notification, compilation and execution of multiple programming languages, run-time FPGA configuration and simulation, which considerably augments the exploitability for embedded simulation service. Meanwhile, we offer users a supporting PC (Personal Computer) application to attain pertinent features, which has a multithreading GUI (Graphical User Interface). In order to verify this design, we deploy a prototype on a Xilinx Zynq™-7000 AP (All Programmable) SoC (System on Chips) Z-7010 on a ZYBO Board. We apply an image processing SW/HW co-design project to our prototype. The experiment result demonstrates the system's portability and efficacy when dealing with remote access, and flexibility when simulating SW/HW co-design projects through PR (Partial Reconfiguration) technique within reasonable latency. The latency for the end-to-end reconfiguration of a 306.60KB partial bitfile is 8.819ms.