Optimizing Partial Reconfiguration of Multi-context Architectures

Multi-context reconfigurable arrays provide the ability for fast dynamic reconfiguration once the configurations have been stored into the architecture´s context memory. Besides switching the context of the entire array it is also possible to reconfigure contexts from outside the array, which we call external reconfiguration. If supported by the architecture, this reconfiguration, as well as switching contexts, can be performed partially. In this paper, we show how to take advantage of partial reconfiguration to optimize the latency induced by external reconfiguration. As an example we reconfigured an array to process FFT kernels of different sizes. As the best result it was even possible to achieve zero cycle latency.