Configurable coprocessing with an ARC-PCI board

The paper describes a reference design for an ARC-PCI (Altera Reconfigurable Computer-peripheral component interconnect) board. The reference design consists of a hardware control unit, an operating system specific device driver and an API (application program interface). The hardware control unit configures the programmable logic devices and connects them to a 32-bit PCI bus interface. Device drivers are provided for Microsoft Windows and Debian Linux. The API provides a common software library in both operating environments to permit the rapid development of applications. Buffering is used to reduce the delays associated with context switching. Experimental results indicate that the reference design delivers near-optimal bus transfer rates. These results also show that the Linux implementation outperforms the Windows implementation by 5% to 25%, depending upon the type of transfer required.