A Novel Approach for Finding Candidate Locations for Online FPGA Placement

Reconfigurable computing (RC) has been viewed as an efficient solution to achieve high performance and flexibility. Hardware tasks can be dynamically placed on and removed from reconfigurable platforms. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) provide partially runtime reconfiguration (PRTR) at runtime. However, this reconfiguration will lead to more time overhead. An efficient algorithm to manage empty space is necessary for online task placement on a PRTR FPGA. This paper first proposes a data structure to maintain information about the available free area and then presents a novel approach to find candidate locations for online FPGA placement. Experimental results show that the approach proposed here is better than similar approaches to find locations for task placement.