Supporting a wide variety of communication protocols using partial dynamic reconfiguration

Supporting a variety of communication protocols for test support equipment has typically required extensive hardware and Input/Output (I/O) interfaces targeting each protocol specifically. Recent advanced designs in the past ten years have created more dynamic approaches by using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and embedded hardware to implement or simulate previous hardware I/O designs. The dynamic possibilities of FPGAs have recently been expanded with the introduction of Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR), which allows part of the FPGA to be reconfigured while the rest of the logic remains static. This paper evaluates the advantages and disadvantages of using DPR to interface with various communication protocols in test equipment.