Dynamic loading of peripherals on reconfigurable system-on-chip

Most current FPGA-based systems use FPGAs as slave coprocessors under control of a host CPU, and use a single static FPGA configuration per application. The advanced features of modern FPGAs mean that dynamic partial self-reconfiguration system can now be implemented on one single FPGA. This paper describes such a system which is able to dynamically reconfigure itself to connect different peripherals to a system as required. This process includes auto peripheral detection, hardware dynamic partial self-reconfiguration and software dynamic driver loading.