An application scenario for dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs

Abstract

Several recent studies have shown the technological feasibility of dynamically reconfigurable field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). In this paper, we introduce an application scenario from the area of autonomous robots which benefits from this technology as it uses elastic algorithms. The processing unit in an autonomous robot must handle localization, cognition, motion control, and perception. We analyze several elastic algorithms which solve the different tasks of the proposed application. Additionally, we suggest a design methodology for dynamically reconfigurable FPGAs that divides the problem into several steps and addresses them separately. In the first step, compiler optimization techniques are used to generate suitable data flow graphs. Then FPGA configurations are assigned to the tasks in these graphs. Finally, the configuration sequence with the minimal amount of reconfigurations is obtained by solving a Shortest-Common-Supersequence problem.