Model-driven design flow for distributed control in reconfigurable FPGA systems

One of the most challenging and time-consuming design tasks for dynamically reconfigurable FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) systems is the design of runtime-adaptation control. This aspect covers various points such as runtime-monitoring, reconfiguration decision-making and reconfiguration realization. In this paper, we propose a control design flow aiming at facilitating the designers work and enhancing their productivity through high design reuse and automation. The proposed flow combines control distribution and Model-Driven-Engineering (MDE). The distributed control structure proposed in this flow aims at facilitating the reuse of the control design by using separate controllers for local and global control problems. The flow enables designers to move from high-level control models, using an extended version of the MARTE (Modeling and Analysis of Real-Time and Embedded Systems) UML standard profile, to an automatic generation of the corresponding VHDL code. The flow was validated through a video processing case study from modeling to implementation in FPGA.