CERPID: a reconfigurable platform interface driver for Windows CE.NET

With the proliferation of computationally demanding embedded applications and the emergence of reconfigurable hardware devices, embedded systems would soon be designed around hybrid computational platforms consisting of a general-purpose processor and a reconfigurable logic unit. Such units can be reconfigured, often on the fly, to enhance the execution performance of various embedded applications. Microsoft´s Windows CE is among the most widely used operating systems in embedded systems. However, its capabilities must be extended to support such hybrid computational platforms. In this paper we describe CERPID, a new class of device driver designed to manage hybrid computational platforms running under Windows CE. CERPID is a dynamic link library based on the Windows CE stream interface model. It consists of a layered architecture that abstracts the complexity of the operating system and provides an easy-to-use API for high-level language programmers to use the reconfigurable hardware. To demonstrate the functionality of CERPID, we develop a test application that we try on the XSA-50 Spartan-II FPGA Board from Xess Corporation