Partial Reconfiguration Controller Research Articles

Automated design and usage of the Fault-Tolerant dynamic partial reconfiguration controller for FPGAs

This article presents a new design automation method for Fault-Tolerant (FT) systems implemented on dynamically reconfigurable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The method aims at minimizing the human interactions needed to incorporate FT mechanisms into an existing system. It starts with a source code of an original unhardened circuit. It continues by automated manipulation of the source code, algorithmic strategic selection of suitable FT techniques, design space exploration of candidate FT implementations, and selection of the resulting implementation. The method also includes efficient evaluation of achieved FT parameters performed on the target HW. As a novel approach working on the level of HW description languages is employed, the code modification is separated, which differentiates our method from others. The case study utilizing this method targets the design of an experimental FT dynamic partial reconfiguration controller for an FPGA. This controller is helpful for the restoration of faulty components due to a single-event upset on an FPGA. We used the method to generate a set of Pareto-optimal controllers concerning the design’s Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) parameter, power consumption, and size. Then, the FT controller is connected to several benchmark circuits, and the reliability parameters are evaluated at the entire system level. Our results show that by replacing the standard reconfigurable controller with our automatically-designed FT controller for one specific benchmark, the design size increased by 20.1%, and MTTF increased by 11.7%. However, the efficiency is highly dependent on the target system size, MTTF, and circuit functionality. We also estimate that a complex system defined by half a million configuration bits would improve MTTF by more than 50%.

ReCoFused partial reconfiguration for secure moving-target countermeasures on FPGAs

Partial reconfiguration is a versatile technique to modify the functionality of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) at run time. When performing partial reconfiguration a dedicated intellectual property (IP) component of the FPGA vendor, i.e., the partial reconfiguration controller (PRC), among a wide range of IP components has to be used. While ensuring the functional safety of FPGA designs is well understood, ensuring hardware security still remains challenging. This applies in particular to reconfiguration-based countermeasures which are intensively used to create a moving target for an attacker. Reconfiguration-based countermeasures against side-channel attacks or differential power analysis (DPA) attacks were implemented. However, from the system security perspective, the above mentioned PRC is a critical component as was noticed by many papers before. In this work, we extend a previously proposed safety mechanism which creates a container around an IP, to encapsulate and thereby to protect and observe the PRC of a FPGA. The proposed encapsulation scheme results in an architecture comprising so-called ReCoFuses (RCFs), each capturing a specific protective goal which have to be fulfilled at any time during PRC operation. The terminology follows the classical electric installation including a fuse box. In our scheme we employ formal verification to guarantee the correctness in detecting a security violation. Only after successful verification, the RCFs are integrated into the ReCoFuse Container. Experimental results demonstrate the advantage of our approach by preventing attacks on the PRC of a system secured by partial reconfiguration.

Design of NIOS II Soft-Core based Partial Reconfiguration Controller in FPGA for MPSoC Design

Recent advancement and research in FPGA has led to the development of energy optimization techniques and runtime partial reconfiguration in FPGA. This work describes an effective approach for power reduction techniques in FPGA based Multiprocessor system-on-Chip (MPSoC) platform and it works on partial reconfiguration technique during runtime. Partial reconfiguration is implemented to reconfigure only a part of FPGA dynamically and other parts of the device continues there operation undisturbed. NIOS II soft-core processor is programmed as control processor to perform reconfiguration partially and also it manages the dynamic power optimization process. This control process is further configured for clockgating which works on a FPGA logic element and cut down a substantial part of dynamic power dissolution in FPGA. Proposed power optimized low power MPSoC is implemented using ALTERA cyclone III FPGA and its power analysis is performed and summarized.