Efficiently Generating FPGA Configurations through a Stack Machine

Parameterizable configurations are regular FPGA configurations in which some of the configuration bits are expressed as Boolean functions of a set of parameters. These configurations can be rapidly transformed to a specialized configuration by evaluating the Boolean functions for a specific set of parameter values and are therefore ideal for use in run-time reconfigurable systems. To accommodate the use of parameterizable configurations in commercial FPGAs, the concept of the Parameterizable Bitstream was introduced. In this paper, we introduce a hardware implementation that evaluates the Parameterizable Bitstream based on a stack machine architecture. We enabled fast generation of specialized configurations with a significant reduction in resources (80%) in comparison to the MicroBlaze soft processor when it is used as a configuration generation engine.