Configuration System Based on Internal FPGA Decompression

Nowadays Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are an improved technology for developing high-performance embedded systems. SRAM-based FPGAs offers the possibility of in-the-field reconfiguration that results in the ability to adapt the product to modified user’s requirements, to enrich the product’s features, or simply to correct bugs. With the advent of multimillion gate FPGAs, the size of the configuration information that defines what circuit the FPGA implements has increased drastically, and thus the amount of external memory needed to keep the configuration data is increasing dramatically. The work presented in this chapter describe a novel configuration compression system that exploits internal configuration mechanism of modern SRAM-based FPGAs and results in high compression efficiency. The proposed system is applicable to any modern SRAM-based FPGA devices having an embedded microprocessor core since the configuration data are processed as raw data. Moreover, the proposed approach does not require any external hardware support and allows high speed dynamic reconfiguration. Experimental results on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs platform implementing several real-world circuits demonstrated 82% savings in memory on the average.