On the Development of a Runtime Reconfigurable Multicore System-on-Chip

Over the last years, several research groups have built reconfigurable systems to obtain high performance at low cost by specializing the computing engine to the computation task. Nowadays, FPGA-based multi-core architectures and reconfigurable computing are widely used for embedded systems, even if the development of complete and efficient solutions on this kind of devices is still quite a complex task. Within this context, what seems to be neglected so far is the combination of a multicore architecture with reconfigurable abilities to vary at runtime not only the hardware components but also the number of the available processors. The variation of the number of processors available on the device can be performed in a dynamic way by using the proposed solution, based on a partial bitstream, characterized by the presence of a reconfigurable system in which both components and component memories can be reconfigured at run-time. This paper presents a study of the viability of making a scalable and flexible multicore System-on-Chip (MPSoC) based on customizable reconfigurable processors, called Multi-Adaptive Reconfigurable Core (MARC), providing the communication infrastructures and the memory management required to create such a complex system-on-chip.