Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration: The Caronte Approach. A New Degree of Freedom in the HW/SW Codesign

The design of embedded systems is rapidly changed during the last decade. It is possible to identify two main factors that are involved in this process: HW/WS codesign and dynamic reconfigurable architecture. This work aims at introducing an innovative methodology that allows to easily implement on an FPGA a system specification, taking as input its high-level description, such as C or SystemC, and exploiting the capabilities of partial dynamic reconfiguration and HW/SW codesign methodologies. In order to meet the software requirements of complex systems, the solution is also provided with the porting of a real-time GNU/Linux OS, CLinux, which allows software processes to exploit a rich set of features, and with a Linux module that simplifies the handling of reconfiguration