Síntese e implementação de circuitos digitais reconfiguráveis dinamicamente

Abstract

The paper presents a technique for the design of dynamically reconfigurable circuits that has been proposed to students within the discipline on reconfigurable computing (computação reconfigurável) for the LECT specialty (Licenciatura em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemática). The technique is based on the use of hardware templates (HT), which are circuits that have been designed for a wide group of similar applications. Customizing the HT for a particular application is achieved by specification of the proper control sequence. Possible changes in control sequences are carried out by control circuits that allow static and dynamic modifications to their behavior. Such behavior has been provided with the aid of a reprogrammable finite state machine (RFSM). The paper describes the proposed projects based on the mentioned above technique. Each project includes a software part implemented in C++ programs running on a host computer and a hardware part realized in commercially available FPGA XC4010XL of Xilinx linked to the host computer through a parallel port.The FPGA circuit is composed of the following four primary components: interface with the host computer; a set of control units, an execution unit and a reconfiguration handler that provides the required dynamic modifications to the FPGA circuit functionality. The following 4 papers [1-4] present the concrete results of the projects and show how the proposed problems have been solved by the 4th year students of LECT.