A Requirements-Driven Reconfigurable SoC Communication Infrastructure Design Flow

Classical approaches to dynamic reconfiguration address computational cores reconfiguration in order to configure the device with the best set of computational elements that are able to accomplish the desired task, thus focusing on a task-driven reconfiguration. This paper introduces a novel approach that exploits performance-driven reconfigurations, in order to adapt the current system configuration (in particular its communication infrastructure) to the required performances, in addition to the required functionalities. This is possible due to the Reconfiguration Oriented Metrics (ROMe) design flow, that leads to realize reconfigurable systems including a reconfiguration controller to manage the reconfiguration itself. This controller has to be able to make coherent decisions (with respect to a well defined set of reconfiguration oriented metrics) about communication infrastructure reconfiguration processes, in order to make it possible to achieve the desired performance (e.g. latency, throughput or power consumption).