Dynamic objects: Supporting fast and easy run-time reconfiguration in FPGAs

Partial reconfiguration capabilities must be exploited to obtain the maximum benefits from dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs. Partial reconfiguration process management still faces a set of open problems that have thus far made it impossible to take full advantage of partial and dynamic reconfiguration. The work presented in this article proposes a novel architecture, development workflow, and modelling approach for dynamically reconfigurable systems management using an object model that offers a global solution. This solution is built on a system-level middleware that provides the infrastructure and tools for communication between different components in heterogeneous embedded systems. Several experiments were performed to test and evaluate each part of our proposed solution, and the obtained results are presented. These results demonstrate the excellent performance of our proposed solution.