Increasing design changeability using dynamical partial reconfiguration

Recent questions of physics lead to the construction of high energy physic experiments like ALICE at CERN or CBM at FAIR. Since research goals evolve over the lifetime of such experiments, it must be possible to change the functionality of filters and other processing units after their installation. Hence, it has been common for years, to utilize reconfigurable FPGAs for data filtering and data forwarding. This paper illustrates how a dynamical partial reconfiguration framework can help to significantly increase the changeability of these FPGAs regarding typical data acquisition applications and algorithms, which finally leads to a better capacity utilization and thus enables cost and energy savings.