A hybrid prefetch scheduling heuristic to minimize at run-time the reconfiguration overhead of dynamically reconfigurable hardware [multimedia applications]

Due to the emergence of highly dynamic multimedia applications there is a need for flexible platforms and runtime scheduling support for embedded systems. Dynamic reconfigurable hardware (DRHW) is a promising candidate to provide this flexibility but, currently, not sufficient run-time scheduling support to deal with the run-time reconfigurations exists. Moreover, executing at run-time a complex scheduling heuristic to provide this support may generate an excessive run-time penalty. Hence, we have developed a hybrid design/run-time prefetch heuristic that schedules the reconfigurations at run-time, but carries out the scheduling computations at design-time by carefully identifying a set of near-optimal schedules that can be selected at run-time. This approach provides run-time flexibility with a negligible penalty.