Sequencing Run-Time Reconfigured Hardware with Software

Run-Time Reconfigured systems offer additional hardware resources to systems based on reconfigurable FPGAs. These systems, however, are often difficult to build and must tolerate substantial reconfiguration times. A processor based architecture has been built to simplify the development of these systems by providing programmable control of hardware sequencing while retaining the performance of hardware. Configuration overhead of this system is reduced by "caching" hardware on the reconfigurable resource. An image processing application was developed on this system to demonstrate both the performance improvements of custom hardware and the ease of software development.