ACEcardTM: a high-performance architecture for run-time reconfiguration

Recent FPGA architectures have shown an increased emphasis on run-time reconfiguration, or the ability to rapidly change the functionality of the FPGA to sequentially accommodate large processing tasks. In addition, partial reconfiguration allows for the reconfiguration of a portion of the FPGA while the remainder is running. These two features enable the use of reconfigurable computing in high-performance multi-threaded multi-user environments. However, current board designs are not optimized to provide the processing support required to maintain this run-time environment which includes management of the reconfigurable resources, interface to the host processor and data movement. The authors describe the architecture, design and applicability of the ACEcard, a high performance reconfigurable co-processor. The ACEcard contains reconfigurable resources as well as an embedded processor to manage the runtime reconfiguration of those resources. They provide details of the architecture of the card as well as a description of the current and future Java-based runtime environment