UML-based design flow and partitioning methodology for dynamically reconfigurable computing systems

Dynamically reconfigurable computing systems (DRCS) provides an intermediate tradeoff between flexibility and performance of computing systems design. Unfortunately, designing DRCS has a highly complex and formidable task. The lack of tools and design flows discourage designers from adopting the reconligurable computing technology. A UML-based design flow for DRCS is proposed in this article. The proposed design flow is targeted at the execution speedup of functional algorithms in DRCS and at the reduction of the complexity and time-consuming efforts in designing DRCS. In particular, the most notable feature of the proposed design How is a HW-SW partitioning methodology based on the UML 2.0 sequence diagram, called Dynamic Bitstream Partitioning on Sequence Diagram (DBPSD). To prove the feasibility of the proposed design flow and DBPSD partitioning methodology, an implementation example of DES (Data Encryption Standard) encryption/decryption system is presented in this article.