Part-E - A Tool for Reconfigurable System Design

To unveil the potential of reconfigurable systems, strong tool support is required. In particular the modeling and implementation of designs to be executed using the partially reconfigurable capability of modern FPGAs is challenging and hardly supported by current design tools. A key problem thereby is the generation of partial bitstreams. The presented design tool Part-E tackles these challenges in a comprehensive manner. Basically, it is embedded as several plug-ins into the Eclipse platform and thus can exploit the strength and openness of Eclipse. Part-E assembles a design into one single model, making modeling and iterative design of partial reconfigurable systems easy and transparent. Moreover, several extensions have been implemented, for example a facility to generate several partial bitstreams in parallel on several remote computers. Finally, the modeling framework used for the implementation of Part-E facilitates to accept input from various other design environments, offering a well-defined interface to the automated partial bitstream generation of Part-E.