Methodology for designing partially reconfigurable systems using transaction-level modeling

As a matter of fact, there is a lack of tools handling partially reconfigurable FPGAs modeling at a high level of abstraction that give sufficient degree of freedom to the designer for testing scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we present our methodology to fill this gap and take into account partial reconfiguration into high-level modeling with SystemC. Our approach relies on dynamic threads to change the functionality of modules during runtime and on transaction level modeling for all the communications. We introduce a reconfiguration manager to develop and validate scheduling algorithms for hardware tasks management. Moreover, our simulator performs design space exploration in order to find a viable implementation (in terms of reconfigurable zones) for a given application. Our methodology is validated with the modeling of a dynamically reconfigurable video transcoding chain.