A NoC-based custom FPGA configuration memory architecture for ultra-fast micro-reconfiguration

Run-time reconfiguration in FPGAs is an important feature that offers design flexibility under low-cost silicon area and power budgets, at the cost of reconfiguration overhead. The reconfiguration time overhead produced by the conventional configuration ports (such as ICAP) is too high for the reconfiguration technology to be embraced as a standard. Furthermore, the current FPGA configuration memory architecture restricts the access of configuration data to the frame level; this significantly delays the reconfiguration process. The work presented in this paper explores the design space of the configuration memory architecture that fits the design of large FPGA's and is suitable to accomplish needs for ultra-fast reconfiguration. Therefore, the proposed method could be a stepping stone for next generation FPGA configuration memory architecture. Our simulation results show a reconfiguration speed gain of a factor of at least 1000 for substantially big parameterized applications that come with the cost of extra auxiliary hardware used on top of the column-based FPGA architecture.