Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration Profitability for Real-Time Systems

Modern field-programmable gate arrays offer dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) capabilities, a characteristic that opens new scheduling opportunities for real-time applications running on heterogeneous platforms. To evaluate when it is really useful to exploit a DPR, in this letter, we present the characterization of its reconfiguration cost in terms of time and a definition of the “DPR Profitability” concept targeting real-time systems. To obtain such results, the components involved in a DPR process have been identified and an innovative approach to calculate the DPR time and its worst-case bound is provided. We validate our approach on a real DPR-compliant platform, showing that our proposal is general enough to be applied to modern DPR-compliant platforms.