Placement and routing for reconfigurable systems.

Abstract

Applications using reconfigurable logic have been widely demonstrated to offer better performance over software-based solutions. However, good performance rating is often destroyed by poor reconfiguration latency - time required to reconfigure hardware to perform the new task. Recent research focus on design automation techniques to address reconfiguration latency bottleneck. The contribution to novelty of this thesis is in new placement and routing techniques resulting in minimising reconfiguration latency of reconfigurable systems. This presents a part of design process concerned with positioning and connecting design blocks in a logic gate array. The aim of the research is to optimise the placement and interconnect strategy such that dynamic changes in system functionality can be achieved with minimum delay. A review of previous work in the field is given and the relevant theoretical framework developed. The dynamic reconfiguration problem is analysed for various reconfigurable technologies. Several algorithms are developed and evaluated using a representative set of problem domains to assess their effectiveness. Results obtained with novel placement and routing techniques demonstrate configuration data size reduction leading to significant reconfiguration latency improvements.